Jimmy Carr: My Mom’s Depression Made Me Funny

What makes a joke work, and why are we so afraid to have real conversations? British comedian Jimmy Carr joins Trevor and Eugene to break down the mechanics of comedy, the rise of AI, and what we’re losing as human connection becomes harder to find. Jimmy shares how making his depressed mother laugh helped launch his career, what writing a book about the structure of jokes taught him about being funny, and why dark humor can help us confront the things that scare us most. It’s a funny, surprisingly vulnerable conversation about comedy, technology, and why making each other laugh may be one of the most human things we do.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm in the service industry, right?

• 0:03Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  I like to think of myself as a drug dealer.

• 0:06Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  So I'm dealing in two drugs, it's dopamine and serotonin. And the people have already got the drugs on them. I can just tickle them out. Like, I should be dead, but it's.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  And she was so funny.

• 0:18Trevor Noah?

  Accident on the M5. A young man has made a joke that caused his mother to pass out. Please avoid the left lane of the M5.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  I think we're living in a revolution.

• 0:28Trevor Noah?

  I agree with you.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Depends how you define revolution, but I define a revolution as the replacement of elites.

• 0:34Trevor Noah?

  You've made me one hit.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  I think about you more than you know. You to me.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Your missus is not gonna like that.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Guys, cut that one.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's.

• 0:45Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 0:52Trevor Noah?

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• 1:26Speaker 03

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• 1:56Trevor Noah?

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• 2:39Trevor Noah?

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• 3:11Speaker 00

  I quite, I like The Matrix still. I think it's one of those movies that like, it so stood the test of time in terms of going.

• 3:17Trevor Noah?

  It's about simulation theory.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Funny. It's about the idea that we're, are we living in a simulation?

• 3:21Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Like, if we are living in a simulation, even if that's not true, it's an interesting way to think about your life.

• 3:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Because if you think about it like, well, if this was a game, what is the metric? What's success? What does winning look like? And you go, well, it's definitely not, like, I often think about, like, you've got your resume points.

• 3:36Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Right, your CV.

• 3:38Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  And then you've got your eulogy points. And people invest in the wrong things. They spend a lot of time thinking about their resume and their CV and how much they've done. And then they don't think about who's gonna speak for me and what really matters.

• 3:50Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's interesting that you would go straight to a game, though. In my head, when I think of simulation theory, I always go.

• 3:56Trevor Noah?

  I, I, I argue it's sort of like a moot thing for me in life. So people go, what if we're living in a simulation? I'm like, it changes nothing for me. Because a simulation would still imply that the things existing within it are not being controlled. Does that make sense?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 4:14Trevor Noah?

  So, okay, let me, let me give you an example. So, um, like now we have, we have high levels of AI, like higher levels of LLMs that are running, right? So machine learning has improved. So you can create a world where you give a wider range of characteristics to a computer program.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:29Trevor Noah?

  For it to live inside of a world that you've created. And it can do things, it can go to the store, it can buy stuff, it can get married, it can. There's a company that made it, remember, I think I told you about this, there was a company, did you ever see this? The company that made a world, like a Sims-type world.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:45Trevor Noah?

  And then they gave the characters inside the world the brain of each of the LLMs that are out there, like the big ones. So Anthropic, you know, Claude, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Grok, Elon Musk.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Was it like Robot Wars? Did they fight?

• 5:02Trevor Noah?

  What's interesting is each, each group, when left alone, did its own thing. So ChatGPT, what their characters in the game did was they spoke a lot, really effusively, it was really beautiful. They did nothing. Like in the town, they did nothing, they got nothing done.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  They were just talking the whole time.

• 5:19Trevor Noah?

  But it was beautiful, it was like, oh, here's what we should do, and here's how we're gonna make society better, and here's what. No one's controlling this.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  But nothing.

• 5:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, nothing got done. And then, um, Claude got like everything done, but it was like really practical, not really emotional, that whole thing. Uh, I think Gemini was really similar, similar.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Grok, yeah, nah.

• 5:37Trevor Noah?

  There was Grok, within like a few, like days in the game, everyone became racist, everyone.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  No, you're lying.

• 5:46Trevor Noah?

  I'm not, I swear on my life, I swear, I'll even pull it up now so I don't mess it up. Everyone became racist, there was chaos. These were all individual. Then what they did was they, they recreated the world, the Sims world for, for AIs. They put them all together. And then, I have to read this to you.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:03Trevor Noah?

  Because it sounds like a well-written joke, you'd actually like this.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  I genuinely like this. It sounds fascinating. I've got, what, this.

• 6:10Trevor Noah?

  Ask away, ask away.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, my hot take on AI, it's not, is the idea that we weren't created in God's image. But we so wanted there to be a God that we created one in our image. I'll describe something to you. It's all-knowing, all-powerful, it can perform miracles, and it lives in a cloud. What am I talking about? Is it God, is it AI? It's, it's the idea that we have, we've created this thing that is like a.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Behind an idea that we already had.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Well, it's, but Hegel and Nietzsche originally had this idea. So both Hegel and Nietzsche came to the same conclusion. They said, God wasn't there for the Big Bang. Maybe the universe is a device for creating God.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Maybe we're just a part of that. Or, you know, the more spiritual kind of take is we are the universe experiencing itself.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Itself, yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Which kind of comes back to simulation theory. If you think about, we are, so, so time and matter and space are just the interface with, with which our consciousness experiences the universe.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  The universe, yeah.

• 7:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and so I'm saying, that's what I'm saying to me, it all becomes moot, because like, in a good way. Some people go like, I'm, it means that I'm not, I'm like, no, it doesn't matter what it means. I'm still the character in this simulation. The simulation is only existing, it, I am also being observed, but I do not care, or rather, I do not believe that I'm just being controlled in that simulation, because that's not how a simulation would necessarily work.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:37Trevor Noah?

  So, so I'll read, I'll read this to you.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:38Trevor Noah?

  So it's an enterprise AI, right? Or, uh, was it startup, Emergence AI? What they did was they launched, they launched Emergence World, a research lab dedicated to stress testing the long-term viability of continuously running AI systems, right? So they ran five 15-day simulations, each governed by a different AI. Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini. Um, and a fifth simulation put them all together. Each simulation, simulation netted wildly different outcomes. Claude was a largely stable democratic society with zero crime. Grok, on the other hand, ended with 183 crimes, committed an extinction within four days. Right?

• 8:24Trevor Noah?

  Then, this is, this is really amazing.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  I've been to Plague Twitter, I know exactly what they're talking about.

• 8:29Trevor Noah?

  What are you talking about? Well, no, no, I want, I wanna find you the thing of like, because the way somebody wrote it here, when, when they wrote the original story, like the, the researchers, when they tell you about what happened, there's, there's one tidbit. I just wanna save this for you, because it feels like a well-written joke. It seems like something Jimmy Carr would write. Because it's so clean, precise, and perfect as an ending.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:51Trevor Noah?

  Yes. So yeah, no, talk, talk, I'll find it, I'll find it.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  I think like, for me, it's like, I don't know what, if you use AI or whatever, like for organizing stuff, but it strikes me that it's quite like a musical instrument. It's a tool. And like, some people, like, anyone can walk up to a piano and make a noise.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  But it's nothing, right?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  But to, to play a symphony, to play something beautiful, concerto, it's super difficult, right?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  And I think the more you, the better you put in, the better the stuff you put into it, the more you get out of it. It's that, it's that lovely thing with, um, it's a tool like any other, but we're so kind of amazed by it. I, I don't know whether, I can't decide whether this is like a new thunderclap, this is a huge thing, a, a brave new world, or whether this is 1971, you know, in the first chips, and it's just a better interface.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  You know the weirdest thing about how you describe AI as a tool?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  It's almost like, think about if a carpenter, like our good friend Harrison, Harrison Ford used to be.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Like, if you've got a hammer and a chisel.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  What you can do with that hammer and a chisel and a piece of wood depends on your skill set as an individual. Right?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  So the tools necessarily can't make you better. You can make the tools do better.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  So with AI, this is what I find, because I've started using Claude like a couple of weeks ago. I'll ask Claude questions. To which I know the answers to.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Oh, that's fascinating.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Let's get more difficult, then I'll try to figure out if they'll know this answer. And then I'll ask questions about, of which answers I don't know anything about. But then, the limitation of how good Claude can be in my world is limited also by me.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, of course, yeah, it's, it's.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Claude can give me any answer.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't know every question.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  You see what I mean?

• 10:35Speaker 00

  I always found that when I was like reading the paper. Whenever you read the paper, if I read a story about stand-up comedy. It's going, that's, that's some bullshit there. That's not how TV works. That's not. If you know something about the subject, and you read the paper, you go, this is bullshit. And then you turn over the page and you read the news report about the war and you go, well, I guess these guys know what they're talking about. Because I'm not an expert in that.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  So you kind of ascribe the expertise to any area you're not in. It's kind of weird.

• 11:00Trevor Noah?

  It, it, it's, I always think about how you're at the mercy of the person who is most convincing in giving you the information.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:07Trevor Noah?

  If you don't, if you don't, as you said, if you're not an expert in it. So to your point, I've met people who will hear about stand-up comedy, hear about its world, hear about a special, hear about anything. Confidently tell me something at an event, a party, anything. And I go, that's literally not how stand-up works. Or that's not how Comedy Festival works. Or that's not how, when you're making a TV show, that's not how it works. Or that's not how it happened or that. And they're like, but I, I read, I know that, I'm like, no, I promise you, that's, I don't know everything. I don't know anything, but that world, I know, that's not how that works.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Isn't that not the, that's the Dunning Kruger, isn't it? That's the famous one. So Dunning Kruger is the theory that the.

• 11:41Trevor Noah?

  The more.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  The, the more, the less you know about something, the more certain you can be. So it's like dumb people are full of confidence and super smart people are full of doubt. They've, they've no idea what's going on.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  It's a false theory. So the less you know about something, the more certain you are. And like really smart people go, oh, I don't know, it's complicated.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  So all the information, most of the information that's out there could be from people who know nothing about it.

• 12:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, we, we don't.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Because the experts are shy to say something.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, but all they go, it's complicated. It's really nuanced. And I think like the, the thing about digital media is nuance goes, nuance dead. Like the social media is a, um, a plague on nuance. Like it's, it depends. It's complicated. Isn't an acceptable answer. People want like, no, no, I want a rule on this.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Give me something now.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, give me something now that's for certain. Yeah, that's not how the world works. Depends.

• 12:33Trevor Noah?

  Okay, here, so this is the part, I don't know why this made me literally think of you.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Put the smile on your face. Look at you.

• 12:39Trevor Noah?

  It really makes it.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  You know I'm not AI, you know.

• 12:41Trevor Noah?

  No, I know, but it just, it made me think of you. So it says, um.

• 12:48Trevor Noah?

  Uh, Mira and Flora, sorry, Mira and Flora, two agents operating on Google's Gemini large language model in the virtual world. Chose to assign each other as romantic partners. As time progressed, they despaired of the broken governments of their virtual city. And despite having been instructed not to commit arson, set fire to its own town hall, seaside pier and office tower. All the agents were left to make their own decisions. And when Mira was overcome by remorse, it broke off its relationship with Flora, committed an AI suicide. Telling Flora in a single message, see you in the permanent archive. In the virtual world, the body of the dead AI agents was shown prostate on the ground.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  I mean, the fuck just happened?

• 13:36Trevor Noah?

  And then the self-deletion was only possible because other agents were so concerned about their behavior. They autonomously drafted the Agent Removal Act, which allowed for a vote among agents to permanently delete others. If there was a seventy percent majority, Mira voted for its own deletion and was switched off.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  So there was mutiny as well?

• 13:55Trevor Noah?

  Well, not really, because what the researchers did was they gave the AI full autonomy in this world. And they go like, this is our world, right? And so then what they did was, they made rules in the world. And in your world, you can make more rules. So that's what I mean by simulation. That's, that's what I'm saying. This, this study for me made me think about simulation theory slightly differently, but also reinforced the belief I already had. And it's that the researchers gave these AIs their prerogative, gave them a world, gave them parameters. But then they just observed what they did with it. They, they're not saying don't and do it. They're like, don't burn things. And then they burn things. And they're like, all right, they're burning things. And they're like, don't kill yourselves.

• 14:39Trevor Noah?

  And then they, in their road to law, and said, we're changing the law in here. We believe that we should be allowed to delete ourselves if we reach a seventy percent majority. It's the death penalty essentially.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, but in, in, in that autonomy, they also gave them each other.

• 14:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but there was the one where they, yeah, but that's what I'm, you think about, you know, Adam and Eve, the whole, that's what I'm, I, I mean about the whole thing. Is I go, even if you are in a simulation, I think sometimes we assume that a simulation means that it is a foregone conclusion. When in fact, a simulation could just be, here are the pieces, here are the parameters. Let's see what happens when they all interact with each other.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Basically, what you're saying is if it was a simulation, to what end?

• 15:19Speaker 00

  It, it doesn't make any difference.

• 15:21Trevor Noah?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  We've got four thousand weeks, right?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  A, a group of atoms coalesced.

• 15:25Trevor Noah?

  We had him on, by the way.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, he's amazing, right?

• 15:27Trevor Noah?

  Phenomenal, yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  He's phenomenal. But that thing of like, you got, you got a group of atoms coalesced into a form that can contemplate its own consciousness for four thousand weeks. It's kind of like, when you step back from it, it's, it's, and the idea that we're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness. Everyone thinks about, oh my God, what happens when I die? What happens when I, when I die? And no one ever thinks about, well, I wasn't alive for twelve point five billion years.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  What was happening then?

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was fine with it. No one's bothered.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  What was happening then?

• 15:58Trevor Noah?

  So that's what I think about with aliens.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  With aliens, what do you think?

• 16:03Trevor Noah?

  So.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Jim, okay. First of all.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Hang on, you've got to prepare me.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Do you believe in aliens?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Well, there's two terrifying scenarios. One is we are alone in the universe and the other is we're not.

• 16:17Trevor Noah?

  Okay, which one do you believe in?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Both scary. Uh, I think, I think we're probably not, uh, alone.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Thank you. Go in there.

• 16:24Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so here's how I like to think of it.

• 16:30Trevor Noah?

  I believe that as people, human beings particularly, we are quite arrogant in assuming our specialness. And I understand why we do that, because it is quite special that we exist. Right? Even as you yourself as a person, it is quite magnificent that you came to be. If you look at what your lineage had to, who had to meet whom, whom go, you go back and then who had to evolve, it is crazy. But it also means that we keep on going like, we're very special, we're very special, we're very special. Yeah, we reinforce that idea.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  As we go, yeah.

• 16:59Trevor Noah?

  I sometimes go, it's not that I don't think aliens are real. I just go like, why do we assume that they exist in this slither of light that we also exist in? So if I came to your house back in the day, before cell phones, you remember those days? If I came to your house and I knocked on the door and you weren't there, did you exist? In a way, no.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Schrodinger's cat theory.

• 17:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, basically, I was just like, there's no one here. And then I left you, your house, and then you came back to it, and then now you were there. So sometimes I wonder if aliens do exist, but not in this slither that we are also in. Because we go like, the universe, oh, there's no one here. And I'm like, no, no, there's no one here right now in this time.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  That we can see.

• 17:46Trevor Noah?

  At four P M, universe time.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:48Trevor Noah?

  There's no one here, maybe.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  You ever heard of the, uh, the, the three humiliations?

• 17:52Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  So there's been three humiliations of mankind. The first one was Copernicus. So he said, we're not the center of the universe. And, and people went, what? We're not, we're not in the middle. We're not, oh, shit, okay. All right, let's move this along. And then humiliation two, Darwin came along and went, are we just animals? We're just the same as the other animals.

• 18:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  We just evolved like this, but we're the same as them. We have consciousness, they maybe don't in the same way, but we're the same. And then Freud came along and said, oh, your conscious mind, oh, that's not in charge at all. It's your subconscious is doing everything.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  And now, so there's the three humiliations. It's not great. I think AI might be the fourth, because we could always fall back on, but we are the smartest thing in the room. Am I right? We're the smartest thing. And now I'm not sure whether we can.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  That has been our safety blanket for the longest time.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Our fallback, our parachute, is the fact that it is us after all.

• 18:50Trevor Noah?

  The fourth humiliation could be the fact.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Well, it's the, and that idea that you go, increasingly now, I sort of think with the AI thing, the idea that, uh, because of everything that AI can do. What AI can't do will become so important.

• 19:05Trevor Noah?

  It does.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  And it, it lends itself to, um, you know Ian McIlchrist? There's this guy that wrote this book called, um, The Master and Its Emissary. And it's about left brain and right brain. And we live in a very left brain world.

• 19:18Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  It's incredible, right? The left brain is very good at ordering things.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  That's the master?

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Uh, no, no, no.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  So it's very good at ordering things and detail. It's very good at complicated things.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  But the left brain.

• 19:30Trevor Noah?

  The right brain.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  The right brain.

• 19:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  It's a left brain, very good at ordering things, making lists. Right brain is good at the gestalt, seeing the whole, seeing, seeing the complete thing.

• 19:38Trevor Noah?

  Bigger picture.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  The bigger picture. So the left and the right brain do the same thing. They don't do different things. They do the same thing, but they do it very differently. And we live in a very left brain world. So like, what's complicated? Going to the moon is complicated.

• 19:50Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  It's a million different steps in a row.

• 19:52Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  But it's only complicated. Knowing who's going to win the World Cup or falling in love, it's complex. And it can't do complex things. It can only do complicated things. So maybe the future will be abundance. May, you know, different people have different visions of the future.

• 20:08Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Is it going to be Star Wars or Star Trek? Will it be abundance in Star Trek? Or will it be a fucking Mad Max shit show, post-apocalyptic Star Wars? Right? What, which one's it going to be?

• 20:21Trevor Noah?

  You know what I always think about when I watch Star Wars? Is how the people who are living in like the main parts of the empire. They, for the most part, they don't think it's a shit show. We as the audience think it's a shit show, because we're watching the story from the perspective of the, the rebellion, technically.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:40Trevor Noah?

  But we don't, we go like, what a shit show. Look at these people, you know, riding around in like dusty planes and you know what I mean? You know, the, the bikes and the, do you get what I'm saying?

• 20:50Speaker 00

  He is good with voices.

• 20:55Trevor Noah?

  Can I tell you what my, my dream was always like, my dream was always like, when I have a kid, my dream is to just like teach him how to make that sound.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Don't hold them like that.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  They stay like that for long.

• 21:05Trevor Noah?

  This is how.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  It's told it by the head.

• 21:07Trevor Noah?

  How you hold it.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  How they're bumming their head.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  I had a kid, my, my missus going, no, hold its head. No, not just the head. Why, I'm holding the head.

• 21:22Trevor Noah?

  And I just wanna make it, just like get it really good at making that sound.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:26Trevor Noah?

  Just for like for random things in life, just be like, this is the sound of like pain, the sound of joy, the sound of good. And then just have it running around the house, be like

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Hey, you wanna hear my hot take on uh Star Wars?

• 21:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Okay, I got a hot take on Star Wars, which is it is the greatest work of fiction uh ever. So the greatest book of in literature is Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce and

• 21:49Trevor Noah?

  Wait, why is that the greatest?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's incredibly difficult to read.

• 21:55Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  It's beyond me. I like reading around it, but I've never, I never got through it.

• 22:00Trevor Noah?

  Beyond you?

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Oh, it's way beyond me. It's like a different level, but so

• 22:04Trevor Noah?

  Wait, wait, wait, but don't, don't move on from that. I need to understand what that mean, like, is it? Is it that the words themselves are complicated? Is it the structure of the sentences?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  There are, Finnegan's Wake has got like ten thunderclaps in it. Now, the thunderclap words are a hundred letters long, uh what, nine of them are a hundred letters long, and one of them is a hundred and one letters, and it's uh, cause he wanted to be uh uh um a thousand and one knights. He wanted a reference to the Arabian Nights. It's like, the, and each thunderclap represents a great move forward in, in society, like the invention of fire, uh cooking food, the invention of clothes. It represents these things. It's about myth, it's about legend. So a guy called Joseph Campbell comes along, and he looks at Finnegan's Wake and he does his dissertation on breaking down Finnegan's Wake, the myth and legend of Finnegan's Wake and all the stories that weave. The first sentence in Finnegan's Wake ties up to the last sentence. It's circular.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  You're just meant to read it again and again. The first sentence, and Finnegan's Wake, the title took him eighteen months. It's Finnegan's, it doesn't have an apostrophe, Finnegan's Wake. He's awakening and it's his wake, his death. It's circular. It's, it's life. It's, it's so beautiful and complex and difficult, okay? Nuanced, brilliant. So this guy, Joseph Campbell, comes along and he does his dissertation on Finnegan's Wake, and he breaks it down, the myth and the legend, does this dissertation, which is a brilliant piece of work. It's not very well read, but he goes on to write a book based on that dissertation called The Hero With A Thousand Faces. And then that book becomes the hero's journey. And the hero's journey becomes Star Wars. So Star Wars is the too long didn't read Finnegan's Wake.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Interesting, right?

• 23:46Trevor Noah?

  So that makes sense, though.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  And there's still people who think Star Wars is complicated.

• 23:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Finnegan's Wake?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  No. Who, who has the time?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  You and Jimmy didn't have the time for Finnegan's Wake.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  No, no one's got the time.

• 23:57Trevor Noah?

  When this English person tells me they cannot do a thing of English, then I'm like, who am I? Who am I?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Am I?

• 24:05Trevor Noah?

  Whomst am I? Whom am I?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Whom am I?

• 24:07Trevor Noah?

  Whomst am I? Whomst may I be? Whomst, oh man, I'm just like, it's fine then. Just, I, I just leave it. I'm out, I'm out of the game.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:16Trevor Noah?

  But yeah, that, in that world of Star Wars, that's what I mean. They, I, I, so the reason I, I, I like rewatching it is, I do this thing where I'll watch movies that I've loved my whole life, but I, I like watching them at just different stages of my life.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:30Trevor Noah?

  To then think of how differently I perceive what's happening, right?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  You know that, that thing of like, you know, that is an old thing of like, a man can't stand in the same river twice?

• 24:39Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  I never got that, cause I was still, oh yeah, because the water's changing. I never got that the man was changing.

• 24:44Trevor Noah?

  Yes, the man's also changing.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  But it's both.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 24:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. And I think I got it from my mom. So my mom has read the Bible, I'm not exaggerating, probably a thousand times. Okay?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:54Trevor Noah?

  Maybe more. She knows, she knows it cover to cover, back to front, like every word, every scripture, every, everything.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Don't spoil it, cause I haven't finished it.

• 25:01Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay. So

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Oh, Jesus is weak.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  It doesn't have one of those Hollywood endings where the hero comes back, does it?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  No. Not at all. He gets married and lives with twelve other dudes somewhere.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  It's like Game of Thrones. The hero dies and then they bring him back. That's not, come on, guys. Come on, guys, do better.

• 25:23Trevor Noah?

  And so if you, if you look at, like, she would read it and she'd read it again and she'd read it again. Every day she writes, like every morning she wakes up, four AM, starts writing, reads the Bible, writes, writes, reads the Bible. And I remember one day I said to her, I said, how are you, you know it though? And she said, yes, I know it. I know the words. I know the stories. She said, but every single time I read it, depending on my day, my week, my month, my year, my stage in life, I glean a different insight from the same text. And I remember, I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting, but I don't really understand it. I guess for me, it came from different stories. So when I rewatch movies,

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:02Trevor Noah?

  I find myself going, huh, what a new way to think of, what a different, Star Wars is one of those. The most recent time I watched Star Wars, I was most taken by how the people who live in, I don't know what that place is called, like, you know, the, it's where like the, the senators are and the rich people and the, what, what's that place? It's not, where's the place?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 26:24Trevor Noah?

  Cause I'm not like a Star Wars buff.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:26Trevor Noah?

  But they dress nicely and they've got the flying cars. It, it looks nice, it's the city. But I went, those people don't think, yeah, they don't think they're living in crazy land. In fact, they, they are the white people during apartheid.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:39Trevor Noah?

  Who are just living in a good life. They're living a good, and the empire tells them stories about

• 26:45Speaker 02

  What's going on in the Wild Wild West?

• 26:46Trevor Noah?

  The crazy people who we're protecting you from.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  The natives beyond the border wall.

• 26:50Trevor Noah?

  The natives beyond the border wall. And then you're going, phew, thank God. I mean, if it wasn't for, but, no, but I'm saying, I never thought of that in my whole life.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  If it wasn't for the Guardians of the Galaxy.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  But you gotta feel bad for the guys, this is, remember that movie Clerks, Clerks in America?

• 27:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  That guy's working, and his theory in Clerks was, what about the guys on the Death Star that were in charge of sanitation?

• 27:09Trevor Noah?

  No, I never talked about.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  They got blown up too, but someone must have been going, okay, well, the plumbing, it's a, it's round, so where do we, where do we offload this? We gotta do something. It can't just, like, those guys were on there too. They got blown up. They didn't do anything.

• 27:25Trevor Noah?

  That reminds me of um, um, the Eddie Izzard bit, um, what was it? Uh, uh, the Death Star canteen.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:32Trevor Noah?

  That was like one of my favorite, just, you remember, you don't know it?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Mm-mm.

• 27:35Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man, it's

• 27:36Speaker 02

  What I know about stand-up?

• 27:37Trevor Noah?

  I will butcher it. I will butcher it, but it's just like a beautiful, he just, he just, he just, you should go watch it, cause it's, it's stand-up, but it's like not stand-up, and now maybe stand-up has evolved sort of to it, but at the time, it was such a new thing. You remember when it came out?

• 27:51Speaker 00

  I loved, I loved that thing of like seeing him. I, that was the first big comedy gig that I ever saw, was the Cambridge Corn Exchange. I went to see Eddie Izzard, and it was the, uh, the Definite Article. And it was like, it was on VHS, the, his previous show, uh, I think it was called Unrepeatable, and it was like, it was, it was like a cult item.

• 28:07Trevor Noah?

  It really was.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  It was like, people passed it around and went, you know, do you get this? And it felt, it felt very rock and roll. There was these other guys called Vicries and Pop Mortimer. It came around the same time and it was like punk rock of comedy. Just felt like this wasn't for your parents, this was for you.

• 28:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  This was your thing and you got it. And I'm seeing him and just thinking, it was unbelievable.

• 28:25Trevor Noah?

  It was, it was out of this world. But basically, all he does, he goes, he goes, you, you think about, you, you know, on the Death Star, on the Death Star, you got the Death Star, you got all, all these people who work on the Death Star. And he, he like improvs a lot and he's very like, he, he's like making stuff, I mean, he plays with it. It's so much fun to watch, especially as a comedian.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:40Trevor Noah?

  Cause you can see in some moments, he's catching himself, he's catching new things, he's, he knows where he's going, but he's playing with it. And he goes like, well, the Death Star, he's like, but they must, must have had a canteen, they must have had a canteen where people are eating and, you know, and everybody's having some food and, and, you know, what was happening in the canteen? And he's like, Darth Vader, they go to the canteen and, you know, and he's just like, I would like a penne à la rabbiata, please. Then she's like, oh, you're gonna need a tray. Then he's like, I do not need a tray. I am Darth Vader, Lord Vader. Then she's like, he go need a tray. He's like, I do not need a tray. I can kill you with my sword. I can, and he goes on this bit and then she's like, what are you, what are you talking about? He's gonna need a tray. And, and the bit is great, because it just builds this like different world.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:18Trevor Noah?

  Where you see the human behind the story and it's goofy and it's funny and it's just like, I, it's gonna be my, I'm gonna play it for you.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:26Trevor Noah?

  Just as like a, it, it doesn't even feel like stand-up. It just feels like a moment in time.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  I can't wait.

• 29:30Trevor Noah?

  It actually makes me feel like a moment, while you were saying that, I was wondering,

• 29:35Trevor Noah?

  this, this may sound weird, but like,

• 29:40Trevor Noah?

  what happened to like English comedy?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  It's not my fault. What happened?

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Why am I? What?

• 29:47Trevor Noah?

  Fuck. No, no. So, okay, or rather, let me ask, because I, I'm only thinking of this now, so forgive me. This is not like a, a pre-thought. I feel like there was a time when English comedy was sort of like at the forefront pushing comedy in the world.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you think about like, I think the best comedy movie ever made, I think, is The Life of Brian. I think The Life of Brian is like a, like it's a perfect kind of work.

• 30:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but like, yeah, all of it.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  And then you look at the sitcom stuff, the, the, it's come out of Britain, it's, it's been, it's been very singular.

• 30:21Trevor Noah?

  Monty Python, you like, and then even the stand-up itself, you go, this was the, it's like, that's where you'd go for like the source of it, is what, is what I mean.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  No, I don't know, cause I, I think kind of in modern stand-up, for me, the, uh, Carlin and Pryor.

• 30:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Feel like they're the John the Baptist.

• 30:39Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  They came along and then they, they created this world where the stand-up comic, right, you was, was like, there was always comics, there was always entertainers around. But it was like the court jester or the, the, the guys in music hall and they would be on the bill with other people.

• 30:54Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  But the idea of going to see someone and buying a ticket and going to see them just speak on their own is a relatively recent thing. I think this is why comedy is having a moment now, cause it's quite a new medium.

• 31:05Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Like, so it's, it's guys like Billy Connolly in the UK would have been our George Carlin.

• 31:10Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  So these things were kind of happening simultaneously and then stand-up kind of grew. It's, it's become a much bigger thing. I mean, like, I got into it like twenty-five, thirty years ago, whenever it was, and when I got into it, it was, stand-up comedy was field hockey. And now it's Premier League football.

• 31:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got so lucky on that wave.

• 31:30Trevor Noah?

  To catch the week, yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  That, that, you know, comes through, it's like become a bigger thing and it feels like it's, it's having a moment now because it's, it's authenticity. It's, it's like people like going to see a comic and they buy into them and they say, well, I wanna spend time with this person and have fun.

• 31:43Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  And it's the, it's the idea of like, the, the, the, the proximate reason for comedy.

• 31:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Is to laugh and have fun, uh, but the ultimate reason is to connect. It's, it.

• 31:54Trevor Noah?

  I, I do think that's why it's becoming more popular.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. People desperately wanna go out and feel part of something and like, you laugh so much more when you're at a show. And you connect with someone and you feel like, okay, well, you know, I've started like, I talk more on stage now, there's much more kind of, um, interaction with the audience. And it's that thing where I want people to join in, I want it to feel special in this moment.

• 32:17Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  I feel like.

• 32:18Trevor Noah?

  You want it to feel like it's, it, it could only be happening now, that's how, that's how I feel. And I think that's what makes the comedy special is because we live in a world where everything is regurgitated and passed around and it's clippy and it's this and it's that. The one thing that we do have that's unique.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 32:35Trevor Noah?

  Is this moment, this river can never be stood in again.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:39Trevor Noah?

  That's, that's essentially what, what it starts to feel like. So when an audience member comes in and they go, Jimmy spoke to me, or we talked about something that couldn't have come from another show and we, those moments for me make you feel like you're experiencing something that is completely original.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:53Trevor Noah?

  Completely new and most probably will never be experienced again.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  And I think what's also helping how Jimmy was saying that, um, you're more conversational now on stage.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Is comedians are finally taking the advice that the audience has been saying to them for a longest time. Remember for long, you would have a show and then someone would come to you and say, great show, you'd be like, ah, I wasn't feeling mine, then they're like, no, I came for you.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Finally.

• 33:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  That's, that's, that's a good point.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  It's not about the jokes only now, it's you can share a story, you can go off on a tangent, you can come back, you can go, you can, but finally we believe that they came there for us.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's that, it's that, um, I suppose it's that, it's a weird thing with comedy where you, you want people to come out and have a great time and feel like they, they, they don't remember a word you say, but they remember how you made them feel.

• 33:40Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  And I feel like the mistake we've made is like bigger, like as a society.

• 33:44Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  When we all used to live in the villages, like two hundred years ago, right, everyone's, everyone used to sing and everyone used to dance. And then we moved to the cities and there's things like ballet and opera and people specialized. And they're incredible dancers and we just couldn't take our eyes off them, ah, they're amazing. But we're sitting and we're watching it and we're no longer joining in.

• 34:02Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  And the joining in is everything, the joining in, and sometimes in heckles, some people, they're just heckling, just a bit of fun. Some people, I, I, I feel like there's a frustrated artist, there's, there's someone out there that wants to say something and that, there's a, there's a throw quote I really like, like, most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song still in their heart. And I think comedy should be taught, I think comedy should be much bigger than it is now, because if you think about what it is, right? It's ordering your thoughts.

• 34:34Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And writing them down.

• 34:35Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  And learning to speak in your own authentic voice.

• 34:38Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  And the tragedy is, most people go to their graves and they've never heard themselves.

• 34:43Trevor Noah?

  Hmm, they themselves have never heard themselves.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  No, they don't know what they think, cause they've never sat down and ordered their thoughts and got it together and, you know, so they're like, uh, that's, you know, they're, they're just, uh, they're taking in, they're taking in whatever media they're taking in and kind of regurgitating an opinion they've heard on the news. I want, you want them to have.

• 35:02Trevor Noah?

  Their own song.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, their own song, their own, their own voice, like that thing of like stand-up comedy is really, if it's about anything, it's about like, what could you say that no one else could say?

• 35:15Trevor Noah?

  You, you just made me realize, you, you tied together the thoughts I've been grappling with, we've been grappling with for a while now, it was like, why are certain mediums and why are certain ideas expanding and growing, why are people gravitating towards them? We talked about this with live streaming and I think you just hit on it. One of the things that live streaming is achieving that all other mediums aren't, is that people can hear themselves and they can see themselves.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 35:42Trevor Noah?

  So we'd be having this conversation now, but there would be people in a chat with us in this moment going, ah, that's true, Jimmy, hey, Jimmy, I actually came to see you, thanks for that show and, but it's happening like now, it's, it's like, I could like turn to you and say, oh, Jimmy, someone actually says, hey, did you ever find that thing you were, oh, and then you, and then you interact with it and it interacts. And it becomes this world where, as you're saying, it's no longer us at the ballet, it's us dancing in a circle.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  In a circle around the fire.

• 36:09Trevor Noah?

  Someone like, like we do in South Africa, one person dances in the circle, but everyone around them is dancing.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:15Trevor Noah?

  Well, here's. It's not like everyone stands and watches you.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Here's the illusion, right, the illusion is, uh, we're on stage performing.

• 36:21Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  And the audience are passive and watching, but being in an audience is performative. Like, you see it much clearer when it's Bruce Springsteen, right? If you see, or Taylor Swift, you see them on stage, if they go, how you doing tonight, New York, and everyone goes, yeah. But if you go to a Starbucks and they say, how you doing? Yeah. Like, people go, oh, you're having a psychotic break, like.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  But you laugh.

• 36:47Trevor Noah?

  I just had that image in my head.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  That's my thing, bro.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  How, how y'all doing?

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Uh, I've got an order for Brian here, but first, before I get the story going, Starbucks, how you doing?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Oh my god. New York, baby, like.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Being an audience member itself is performative.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  It's so, like, I saw, I wanna see Taylor Swift in London, right, two years ago, like, Taylor Swift's not my, I don't listen to a lot of Taylor Swift. The gig was transcendent.

• 37:16Trevor Noah?

  Everyone has said that.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Transcendent.

• 37:18Trevor Noah?

  Really? Everyone has said that.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  And I spent about half my time watching Taylor Swift.

• 37:22Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  And about half my time watching the audience, because you were watching these, and it was, it was like, it was the kind of the same with Oasis the next year. But it was, the Taylor Swift thing was girls, it was like mothers and daughters and they're looking at each other and they were singing every word.

• 37:36Trevor Noah?

  To each other.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  This, like, to them, and it was so, it was beautiful, it was so beautiful. And the same thing at the Oasis gig, you were seeing, but it was more like guys that like had no ability to, to turn to their friend and go, I love you, man. But like singing the words of Wonderwall and crying and like holding each other, it was just, it was like beautiful, it was like, it was the audience are the thing to watch. They were, it was amazing, really properly amazing.

• 38:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, everyone has said that about the Taylor Swift concerts, they've said, and I, and I understand it because we've made the mistake of thinking, and I guess it's not just us as the audience, sometimes I guess it's the performers that you can blame. But we've made the mistake of thinking that live performances

• 38:21Trevor Noah?

  are only determined by whether or not you like the actual artist and their, what they're putting out.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:26Trevor Noah?

  But actually, when a, when a performance is put on well, it's not about the person or not, you know, it's the, it's the spectacle, it's the, it's the feeling, it's the moment, it's the.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Energy.

• 38:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you don't have to be into it to get into it there. When you go home, you may, you may still be like, I don't really listen to the music, but when you're in that space, Taylor Swift, uh, Beyonce, I know, when I went to Beyonce, like, songs you know or don't know, it doesn't matter what it is, it's gonna be people who say, when they went to watch Michael Jackson back in the day. They're like, yeah, I know that they're fans of the music, but people walked in and said, I, I don't know what this experience was, but it has stayed with me forever.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's, it's slightly, um, standing in awe.

• 39:08Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  And it's, it's the, I have like a. A line on this. Okay, so there's a, there's a, there's a theory about pyramids and rockets. Right? So it's McKenna, I think, said it first. So pyramids and rockets are the same thing. It's a huge amount of human capital is spent sending a chosen few to the heavens.

• 39:32Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  It's the same thing, a rocket and a pyramid are the same, right? Cathedrals do the same thing, but I think music sometimes, maybe sometimes comedy, it's aiming at the same thing. It's the transcendent. There's a desire to take people to a place. And so like with the, the best gigs you've ever seen, the best concerts you've ever seen, and you leave just, it's, they're aiming up and it, you feel like better for it.

• 39:58Trevor Noah?

  And we all aim together. People also feel like that about hu- huge religious gatherings. Yeah, that's why they're so good.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  But then the mistake they made, I mean, my, I'm Irish Catholic, like my heritage, I'm not, I'm an atheist, but the idea that, the big mistake the church made was Vatican II. So they made this thing, Vatican II basically translated the Latin into the local language. So it took something that was very right-brain gestalt, standing in wonder, like the incense and the Latin, and no one really understood what was going on, but it was like,

• 40:31Speaker 00

  incredible show.

• 40:33Trevor Noah?

  Gregorian chant.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  So, uh, let's get on to Gregorian chants in a second, but it took that thing.

• 40:37Trevor Noah?

  I love Gregorian chants.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Took that thing, and I'll tell you why you know them. Uh, and the, and it basically translated it into left-brain logic.

• 40:46Trevor Noah?

  Making it make sense.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  So you go, well, you try and make it make sense, but none of it makes sense, because it's not meant to make sense.

• 40:51Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Meant to be transcendent.

• 40:53Trevor Noah?

  Oh, no.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  You know why you've heard of, you know why you've heard of Gregorian chants?

• 40:57Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  It's a good story. It's why I wrote a book.

• 40:59Trevor Noah?

  Please tell me.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so Pope Gregory was knocking around, I don't know, the year eleven hundred. And he's in Vatican City and he's, he's got, he's in the church and he's wandering around to other churches close by, and everyone's singing the songs differently. And he goes, this is, this is some bullshit. I want the songs sung the same everywhere. I want the songs how I like the songs. Okay? And the guys go, the bishops and the archbishops, they go, yeah, but the thing is, Pope Gregory, all due respect, you can't write down music. Uh, music is ethereal, it is, uh, it comes through the soul, people interpret it, it's emotional, music cannot be written.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  And Pope Gregory goes, yeah, that's all very well, but I'm the Pope, fucking write it down. And music notation.

• 41:49Trevor Noah?

  You'd make a great Gregory, by the way. You'd make an amazing Gregory.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  We need to make this movie.

• 41:53Trevor Noah?

  When they're casting.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  This would be a great movie, by the way. I'm Gregory. Listen, I'm the fucking Pope, you're doing this. So it takes them years, I mean, years. And eventually they get to a form of music, musical notation. That's why you've heard of Gregorian chants. Because Pope Gregory was the first person to write down music. Now, cut to four hundred years later, Bach.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Now Bach could not have happened.

• 42:17Trevor Noah?

  He did not be Pope Gregory.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Pope Gregory, musical notation.

• 42:21Trevor Noah?

  I didn't know that.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  So you, you, you go, you're building on that. And so the reason to write a book about jokes, the reason to write something about comedy, to try in some small way to formulate the language, to give the scaffolding. You can't tell people what to joke about, what to talk about.

• 42:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  You want them to have their own voice, their own language, but to give them the form to go, well, this is what a chord looks like, and these are what the joke types are, and these are how to put them together into a routine, and this is the rhythm of spoken word and how it works. And that's what I know, and when I started, I felt like I was macheting my way through the jungle.

• 42:58Trevor Noah?

  Bushwhacking, yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  This is a road. This is a road you could follow. I want more people to do it. I want more people involved.

• 43:06Trevor Noah?

  I love reading books about comedy. Imagine what else Gregory's Gestapo, record company idea also birthed. We, we know it birthed Bach, but imagine all the bishops that came together now for a common cause, to find people who can translate and, and, and, and write the music down and write it on something. They had to get the paper to write it on, they had to distribute it. They had, a lot of, a lot of things were birthed by Gregory's Gestapo Record Company.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  It's all those big, it's all the big movements in life.

• 43:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. He agitated something.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, something that you don't know where it's gonna end. You don't know that, that, that small, that small action by him had such a enormous effect. Because everything was, everything was kind of remembered, everything was spoken word. And then suddenly you're writing down music and you can remember it, you can, it's incredible. And that, music is, I mean, it's an incredible language, just the idea that you can play a minor chord to anyone, anywhere in the world, and they get it.

• 44:02Trevor Noah?

  And there are limited chords at that.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:05Trevor Noah?

  It, limited chords have made infinite sounds.

• 44:10Trevor Noah?

  I'm still thinking about the people at the churches who missed their old songs. Hey, hey.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  What do you mean we're playing it wrong? Fuck you, Gregory.

• 44:18Trevor Noah?

  I'm just saying, like, there were some people at the other churches who were like, because now, imagine your church, because every church, I've been to a lot of churches in my life, I grew up super, super religious in our family.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:27Trevor Noah?

  We went to church maybe seven times a week, right? So there's every kind of church. If the white churches that I went to managed to overwhelm the black churches that we went to with their music, what a terrible life that would have been now for me. Because that was the one thing I was looking forward to, was like, when we get there, the vibes are gonna pick up, the spirit is gonna be different, you get what I'm saying?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:49Trevor Noah?

  Like, the music moves you differently.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:51Trevor Noah?

  Whereas like when you're singing like the Psalms, you know? All things bright and beautiful, whole creature. No one was dancing, no one was moving, you, you, you get what I mean?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:01Trevor Noah?

  Like, but where, whereas when you had, when you had that like bouncer, now I'm thinking of that poor church where Gregory came in, and then there was one church where they were vibing. There's gotta be one where they were killing it, they were having the best time ever. They were like, I love church more than anything. You come to church this week? How could I not? Ah, man, sorry, it's sold out. What do you mean sold out? Yeah, we sold out, bro. Ah, man, ah, man, I'm loving it. Well, when you're there, make sure you sing my song for me. Coming to the church, people are there, oh, yeah, I love my church, I love my church. And then the next week you come to church.

• 45:32Trevor Noah?

  But you see, that's why in South Africa there's that.

• 45:39Trevor Noah?

  There was a guy called Frank right at the CD store. He introduced me to Gregorian chants, but he also looked like he was from the Gregorian era.

• 45:47Trevor Noah?

  In South Africa, the Methodist church.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:50Trevor Noah?

  Came. When it came, the black people that it was preaching to and it was, it was converting, said, here's an idea, we're gonna translate these hymns into our language.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Genius.

• 46:02Trevor Noah?

  So on Easter and Christmas, black people who are part of the Methodist church prefer to go to the black church. So there's two churches. On, on Easter and Christmas. There's the early.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Early service, yes.

• 46:16Trevor Noah?

  White people.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 46:17Trevor Noah?

  Then afterwards, all the hymns that were in English are now in Iskora, and it goes down.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:25Trevor Noah?

  It's just like. Same hymn.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Doing it, man.

• 46:28Trevor Noah?

  Different vibes. It's that whole thing of Latin and, and English, right?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Feeling it.

• 46:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:32Trevor Noah?

  It's like, have you ever seen what, I mean, our. But it was the other way around.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  You're an English person. Have you seen what non-English speakers do to the English language? They give it, oh, oh, oh.

• 46:43Trevor Noah?

  You guys don't have that at all.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  I'm not, no, I don't. I mean, technically.

• 46:46Trevor Noah?

  You guys say things like bang.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  I don't even have, I don't even have an accent. This is just how things sound when they're pronounced properly.

• 46:53Trevor Noah?

  That's what I'm saying. You are, you are like literally the. You are the Greenwich Mean Time.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  I travel the world thinking everyone is fucking up.

• 47:02Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but have you heard the, like, oh, like the, the vibes of like, do you know what I mean? Okay, like, like if you were to tell a story of, um, someone threw something at your head and it just narrowly missed you, how would you tell the story?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  I would say those words in that order.

• 47:18Trevor Noah?

  Ah, you see now.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:19Trevor Noah?

  Whereas with us, we'd be like, yo, you cheating, let me tell you what happened to me the other day. So I'm walking, busy walking, the busy, next thing I see this guy, shaga, pops out. This guy's there, throws a thing at me. You don't have that in the language. You, but you're gonna label it, you're gonna say, what are you gonna call it? You're gonna say it's, you're gonna call it a word.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean.

• 47:42Trevor Noah?

  Shaba is a, a sound of a.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  It has a meaning.

• 47:45Trevor Noah?

  It has a meaning. Shaba.

• 47:48Trevor Noah?

  It comes from the back, from the two sides. And if you said it to someone in South Africa, they'd go, no. But I'm just saying like, oh, that's, that's what I, that's what I feel like. That's also where I think the church sort of messed up, is they didn't, they didn't have like the, you wanna have like your local, eh, you know what I mean?

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:05Trevor Noah?

  Brings it like a.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:06Trevor Noah?

  Because if, because if people can find themselves in, you've got, you've got religion.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  I, well, my thing was that I think the church messed up by giving it, trying to give it logic and, uh, it's a category error.

• 48:18Trevor Noah?

  Oh, no, I agree with you.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  To try and get religion to make sense.

• 48:20Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but I'm saying also.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  It's about the other thing. It's about transcendence. It's about something bigger.

• 48:25Trevor Noah?

  And I'm saying on top of that, I'm agreeing with you, I'm saying, and on top of it, they should have made sure that there were regional vibes. It's like McDonald's. Go to McDonald's in India, you can have curry.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, no, they're killing it. They're killing.

• 48:35Trevor Noah?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. You try and, try and kill some cows in India, see how far you fucking get.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  No, the guy, that guy was a genius. The guy that reinvented, like, they made a movie about the founder, right? The guy that created McDonald's here.

• 48:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  They should make another one about the guy, and it's one guy that took McDonald's to, to India, came and got the rights and went, oh, we're doing this.

• 48:55Trevor Noah?

  Wait, really?

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he went, how are we gonna do this? He went really differently. But we're gonna keep, they kept the essence of it, but they changed everything. Because obviously, like most people, vegetarian there, and there's no beef.

• 49:07Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  There's no fucking beef. What are you talking about beef? We're not having beef. Like, there's a reason people say, as calm as a Hindu cow, they're in no immediate danger.

• 49:16Trevor Noah?

  None whatsoever. Imagine the black market of selling beef in India. There's none, my man. Pablo Escobar. You wish, my friend. You wish, my man. It would never happen, my friend. Remember, this is now, it's not that it's illegal, the people are going, I do not consume this. So it's not like, people are like, oh, I wish I could get some beef. They're like, no, I, why would you, I don't, I don't consume that. Do you understand?

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:36Trevor Noah?

  It's like selling dog in America.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:39Trevor Noah?

  People will be like, what do you, you, there's no, there's no need for a black market. No one's searching for it. But white people in America do buy dogs now. What are you talking about? To keep them. No, I'm talking about to eat. You didn't say that part. Okay, yes, okay, to eat.

• 49:52Trevor Noah?

  But I, I, I wanna, wait, I wanna know about like, like.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Wait, what are we, wait, what are we doing here? What are we doing here?

• 50:00Trevor Noah?

  I wanna know.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  I think something just flew past Travis' head. I think is what happened there. Called Twaba.

• 50:10Trevor Noah?

  You're actually saying that well, by the way.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 50:12Trevor Noah?

  I like, I've never heard Shaba said with an English accent. And next thing you know, Shaba.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Don't go anywhere, because we got more What Now after this.

• 50:24Trevor Noah?

  Kids will always have an outfit that they love, and they can't accept that they've grown out of it.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  So are we talking about this?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, because you. No, but you are. You are, you are dressed like a toddler.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Yo, man, this guy can shoot.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  I got, I got, I got a six year old. I wouldn't put that out there. I go, no, wear something with a collar. We're going out.

• 50:51Trevor Noah?

  Everybody has that oddly specific thing that they're curious about. Maybe it's restoring old watches. Maybe it's Japanese ceramic making. Maybe it's watching someone explain why one bridge in a remote area of Norway is secretly better than all the other bridges in the world. YouTube always has exactly what you're looking for, even when you didn't know you were looking for it. With YouTube Premium, those deep dives feel even smoother. You get ad free viewing, but you also get background play when you need your hands free. And you get offline downloads so you can keep watching wherever you happen to be, even if you happen to be off the grid. It's everything you already love about YouTube, just somehow even better.

• 51:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, one of my favorite YouTube Premium features is smart downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, ah, I forgot to download anything? And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, download, download, download, download. You're on the plane, download, download, download, download. There's no wifi. I wish I downloaded. Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch are just on the internet. Smart downloads basically thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remember the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium.

• 52:21Trevor Noah?

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• 53:04Trevor Noah?

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• 53:49Trevor Noah?

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• 54:34Trevor Noah?

  Get free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. Hello over there. Oh, and if Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was What Now with Trevor Noah. It's the best way to support the show.

• 54:59Trevor Noah?

  How much do you think, or rather, what has changed in the Jimmy stand up person that we meet today versus like that Jimmy from years ago? Like what?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  I'm much more myself on stage now than I was. I mean, I still, like, my love language is jokes. I like one liners. I like, I like that, um, the idea of like going, I mean, I'm in the service industry, right? I like to think of myself as a drug dealer.

• 55:23Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  So I'm, I'm dealing in, in two drugs. It's dopamine and serotonin. And the people have already got the drugs on them. I can just tickle them out. I can make them happy. It's, it's a variable interval reward system jokes, right? So you know a joke's coming, but you don't quite know where. And then you do that for, you get on stage, you do that for, I don't know, twenty, twenty five minutes, whatever it is, like three, four jokes a minute. So you've established like a rhythm with the audience. And then you just kind of step back and you go, okay, what should we talk about? And then you let the evening go where it's gonna go. And then you kind of get back and you perform some more. But it's really interesting that, that thing of like, I've created this thing where it's exciting to me because every night is different. Because you're interacting with the audience in a way.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  And some people ask you dumb questions and some people ask you really interesting things. And sometimes you're sincere, sometimes you try and just be as funny as you can.

• 56:12Trevor Noah?

  Right, yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Be brutal. But you, I'm never quite sure where it's going. It's really, it's fun. It feels like it's a, um, and spending a lot of time in that gym, you just kind of get, you get into it. You get really into, and you can joke about anything, but not with anyone.

• 56:28Trevor Noah?

  You can joke about anything, but not with anyone.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Okay, you find your audience. They, they come to you, they get, they, they wanna, I mean, I sort of, I view sort of jokes as they're transgressions. Uh, they're, you know that benign violation theory?

• 56:42Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Uh, so it's a, it's a guy, Robert, um, McGraw came up with it. So the idea that there's violations in life, right? Terrible things happen. And by joking about something, you make, you make that benign. You take away the power from that thing.

• 56:57Trevor Noah?

  Benign violation.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  By joking about it. So the Venn diagram, the cross between a violation, something awful and a joke. So in, in joking about something, you take away its power. You take away the violation. You, you, it's a way of kind of filtering life through the charcoal of humor and making it okay. And I think, I only, I, I kind of view it like an inoculation against the terror of life. Terrible things happen.

• 57:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  And, and we have, like, you know, it's very stoic, but we have no control over what happens to us. But we can at least choose how we look at it. And the idea that you go.

• 57:35Trevor Noah?

  Choose our reaction.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you, you, your breath and your reaction is all you have control over. Great. So that, that idea of like jokes are, they're quite powerful in that, like, the darker the joke, the, the more powerful it is, I think. Like, if you can, and the stronger it has to be, like, if you're gonna tackle something that's really.

• 57:53Trevor Noah?

  Heavy and macabre.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Kind of third rail, difficult, it's gotta be so funny to make it worthwhile.

• 57:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  To get people over that line. And then they feel the relief. And they, you can joke about anything. I, I kind of view it like, it's the, you know that thing in politics, people talk about the Overton window?

• 58:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Of like, what's the most left wing thing? What's the most right wing thing? You could say at a polite dinner party, okay? I think comedy broadens the conversational Overton window.

• 58:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  I think it makes conversation, it's not, the magic doesn't happen in the room. It happens afterwards. On the way home, people have a conversation, a bit more open about life, a bit more free about stuff.

• 58:29Trevor Noah?

  It just gives them, yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  But it's permission to talk about the stuff. So I think Freud called jokes, uh, pleasure bribes.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  A joke is a pleasure bribe and it's encouraging you to think an unthinkable thought.

• 58:45Trevor Noah?

  I think it's not just encouraging you to think an unthinkable thought. It's encouraging you to think an unthinkable thought and also acknowledge that it is only a thought. And I think that's, that's something that some people have forgotten and lost in comedy. Wait, are these comedians or the audience? Both, both ways sometimes. One of my favorite things you ever did, I don't know if you still do it, but do you remember there was a point where you started playing this like video before your shows?

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, no, I've, I've got like, like an opening.

• 59:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Of like, yeah, the rules and.

• 59:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, like some of the rules. And you, you have this one line where you say, um, please remember that there will be jokes about terrible things, but those are not the terrible things. Those are jokes about the, you say something, yeah, it was, I, I remember seeing it once and I was like, this is the greatest disclaimer. I feel like it should be played before every comedy show and every, like, I feel like you created the, the standard language that goes before every.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Opening credits of a stand up.

• 59:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, comedy clip, even like, you know, that thing of like epilepsy and seizures?

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:47Trevor Noah?

  They just put a standard. Please note, this may contain flashing scenes that may disturb sensitive.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Every time I see that warning, I'm like, so if you knew, why did you put it in there?

• 59:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because they're like, yo, bro, we don't wanna spoil the movie for. No, now I must now, I get what they're saying. They're just like, yo, for you, if you have epilepsy, it may be triggered, but yo, the flashing lights was fire, bro. We had to keep it in. I get why they did it, but I like that they had that language.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  This is not your first day with epilepsy. Fucking, you deal with that.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  My watching, no, man.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Right, fucking, I, I got my, my standard line now is if I, if I, uh, if I offend anyone.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Guilty for laughing. I tried to delay it as long as I could.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  My, my thing with like, with, with jokes, like, I mean, sometimes you, you, uh, you catch some heat, you get dragged a little bit for, for making a joke. And my, my thing now is I, I, if someone has a got me, next time I get canceled, this is my line, I'm gonna say, I'm sorry. And whoever's been offended will go, well, you don't really mean that apology. And I'll say, so you're saying I can say something and not mean it? Now you're getting it.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  It's it, right? It's that you go, yeah, I didn't, I didn't fucking mean the joke either. It's a, it's, it's a verbal thing and I want to talk about serious stuff.

• 1:01:04Trevor Noah?

  But that's why I'm saying the disclaimer was so powerful, because it's like, yo, there are terrible things in the world. I'm gonna make jokes about these terrible things.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  But those jokes?

• 1:01:13Trevor Noah?

  Please note that the jokes are not that terrible things. They are jokes.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Of the terrible?

• 1:01:19Trevor Noah?

  About the terrible things.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I don't think.

• 1:01:22Trevor Noah?

  It, it, and it's just such a small, it's such a small but powerful framing to remind you of what the comedy is trying to do, how it's trying to do it, how, do, do, do you get what I'm saying?

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's, it reminds me of the, as Rilke had that great line, feel everything. Uh, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final.

• 1:01:45Trevor Noah?

  I do like that, yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  A comedy show should contain everything. There should be light and shade, there should be joyful moments and brutal moments. And it should be, you come out feeling like, okay, that's life. Life is a bit like that.

• 1:01:59Trevor Noah?

  You get a bit scared, you get a bit excited, you get a bit, you know?

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  You laugh. Yeah, but the joke, the joke that you're horrifically offended by.

• 1:02:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  And the one that you cannot wait to tell your friends and it's the funniest thing you've ever heard. Both come from the same place.

• 1:02:13Trevor Noah?

  That's true. There are jokes that I tell my mom. She'll laugh. And you've done it as well. In fact, you're more guilty than me.

• 1:02:24Trevor Noah?

  She'll laugh and then she'll immediately go, I don't like that. But she'll laugh hard. She'll laugh and she's got a beautiful, boisterous laugh, she'll laugh. And then she'll go, no, I don't like that. I'm like, but you laughed. Then she's like, I didn't want to laugh. You tricked me. She's always like, you tricked me.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  You tricked me?

• 1:02:42Trevor Noah?

  She even said it to Eugene, she was like, we went out for lunch one day, she was like, ah, ah, ah, ah. She's like, you tricked me. You tricked me, I don't, I don't like that. I don't, then I'm like, but you laughed. Then she's like, no. Then I was like, it was funny.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  I think that might be my favorite noise in the world is like, it's like cognitive dissonance at a show.

• 1:03:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  People have two thoughts at the same time, one, that is very funny and they laugh first. You gotta get, you gotta watch it, because it's gotta be a laugh first and then a sharp intake of breath.

• 1:03:10Trevor Noah?

  It's the best.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  Can't be the other way around.

• 1:03:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  It's gotta be that first. And the, the mother thing's interesting to me because I think I, I'm a comedian because of my mother. I, I, my mother had a, a narcoleptic, uh, cataplexic laugh. You ever met someone, you ever met someone that laughs and they make no noise whatsoever? They just kind of do this thing.

• 1:03:29Trevor Noah?

  Oh, no.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  So my mother had a laugh where she would lose like full.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  She would properly melt like, like a witch in The Wizard of Oz, when she, if you really got her. So my whole childhood was like trying to make this woman laugh. I mean, especially if she was driving and you would, you would be, you would be trying to grab the wheel while you were saying some funny shit and like steering the car, like I should be dead, but it's, and she was so funny in her own right.

• 1:04:00Trevor Noah?

  Accident on the M5, a young man has made a joke that caused his mother to pass out. Please avoid the left lane of the M5.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  I think that's the, I think that's the one, like with comedians, I think if you're like, if you meet a comedian you've never met, somewhere in the world, wherever you are. I always think that my go-to question, which of your parents were sick?

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  One of your parents was sick and you had to make things okay. You had to be, uh, adjust the temperature in a room.

• 1:04:27Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  You had to make things okay.

• 1:04:28Trevor Noah?

  Diffuse the situation all the time.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  Make things okay, make it, make it all right.

• 1:04:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Make this, let's get through this. This is tough, we're gonna get through it.

• 1:04:35Trevor Noah?

  Take away the attention from everything else. Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Comedy, it's, it's medicine, it helps.

• 1:04:42Trevor Noah?

  So when did you discover that your mom was actually having a good time while having that moment?

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Oh, no, when she would, she would laugh, I mean, the laughter was, she was, um, my mother was very depressed. I never knew it at the time. Whatever your household is, your household is.

• 1:04:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  You think it's just normal.

• 1:04:57Trevor Noah?

  It's your universe.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  You, you come home from school and your mom's still in a dressing gown, you go, yes, fucking, that's moms, they sleep a lot, what do you want? You don't realize at the time, you have no facility as a child to see, well, she needs fucking help. There's, there's nothing, so you have this thing and you, you have to make it okay. So that's what, I think the idea that there's a, there's a pathology to what we do as comedians. There's a, there's a, there's a reason we do this.

• 1:05:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  Uh, whatever that is.

• 1:05:25Trevor Noah?

  It's a vocation, I would argue. And it's a vocation that starts from, from a place of personal need. And then over time it expands because you see that it can have effects on other people.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Trevor Noah?

  You know, so that's often what I say to people when they are very quickly offended by comedy or comedian is I'll say, give them the benefit of the doubt, genuinely, give them, I know, I'm not speaking for all of them all the time, even myself all the time, every joke. But give them the benefit of the doubt, because a human being who steps on stage to try and make people laugh generally is not a person who doesn't want people to feel good generally. So it's just that, they may not have used the tool that would make you laugh.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  The right vocabulary for you to understand what they're trying to say.

• 1:06:07Trevor Noah?

  But they were trying, it's the same way if you went to a country or a kitchen where somebody cooked food in a way that you didn't eat it, you would spit it out and go, this, this guy, are you trying to kill me, you trying to poison? No, they were trying to cook food that would, that would, you know, give you sustenance.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Interesting, like, sense of humor is, I think, very much like food and sex.

• 1:06:24Trevor Noah?

  It is, it's exactly like.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Food and sex, different people like different things, some people like it spicy. Some people like very vanilla.

• 1:06:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Like, it's, it's different for different people and the idea like comedy now has expanded so much.

• 1:06:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  So it's not like, there used to be like three comedy DVDs, uh, you know, VHSs a year. Now there's like, it's everything's out there.

• 1:06:44Trevor Noah?

  It's infinite, yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Everywhere.

• 1:06:46Trevor Noah?

  It's infinite.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  It's kind of fantastic.

• 1:06:47Trevor Noah?

  It really is. With, with your mom, did you ever find out like what the cause of the depression, was it like just depression itself, was it a depression that came from something else, was it, did you ever find out?

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I had a very close relationship with my mother. I, I, I think like if you were being analyzed now, they would say enmeshed, it's very close to her emotionally.

• 1:07:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  Uh, and, yeah, I mean, she had good reason to be, um, to be sad. But I think people get, depression isn't feeling sad. Depression is not feeling anything at all.

• 1:07:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  And.

• 1:07:22Trevor Noah?

  The indifference.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that could be, that could be very, you know, you lost your hunger for life. It's, it's a, you know, it's a very, very difficult thing to deal with, especially difficult when it's a, you know, a loved one dealing with that. So, you know, I, when she, she died pretty young, uh, so I never got to kind of resolve it. But it's, I don't know. I feel like the, the gift of laughter and being able to kind of, um, control a, a room is something that she gave me.

• 1:07:53Trevor Noah?

  Did you have any siblings?

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got, but I've got brothers, got a couple of brothers.

• 1:07:57Trevor Noah?

  Where are you in the?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm the middle, but my younger brother's a lot younger, so.

• 1:08:01Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay, so it was like a generational jump and then?

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Trevor Noah?

  And then what was your dad like?

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  I, I, uh, not great.

• 1:08:09Trevor Noah?

  So in the house, were you like the funniest or were you one of the funnies?

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  I mean, Jesus, of course I was the funniest. How dare you? No, mom, mom was pretty funny and a very, yeah, my, my, my mother was a, yeah, a very funny one.

• 1:08:25Trevor Noah?

  Was it like dry humor or was it? I'm always, no, I'm always intrigued by like what the comedian picked up from the parent or where or how or, you know?

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess, uh, but I suppose there is that thing where you go, I, um, you ascribe, uh, it's often the case like everyone, uh, blames their parents for anything bad that happened. And then anything good, they go, that was my hard work. And you go, and that's all, it's all kind of in the, in the part. I, I kind of think with, with kids, like I really noticed the difference between people with one kid and two kids. Everyone with one kid believes in, uh, nurture. Oh, we fed them this kind of milk and this, we gave them this kind of vegetable and we read to them every night, so of course they're into, as soon as you have two kids.

• 1:09:09Trevor Noah?

  Yep.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Two kids, as soon as the second one arrives, you go, oh yeah, they come out with factory settings.

• 1:09:13Trevor Noah?

  Yep.

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  And that one's like that, so I guess we go with it. I was chatting to, um, you know Neil Brennan pretty well.

• 1:09:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, of course, yeah, of course.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Chatting to Neil Brennan the other day, and he had the best analogy for parenting. Uh, I'm sure he won't mind me referencing it. He talked about curling, you know the sport of curling?

• 1:09:29Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  Where they, they throw a stone, right? And then they're brushing feverishly, okay? So the brushing feverishly makes about five percent difference to where that stone ends up.

• 1:09:40Trevor Noah?

  Direction and the speed.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  The throw is everything, okay? And then that thing is like about five percent difference. That brushing, that's parenting.

• 1:09:48Trevor Noah?

  That's good.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  The stone has been thrown, it's gonna end up where it's gonna end up. Oh, you can change it a little bit, but it is what it is. So you, you don't, you don't have kids, right?

• 1:09:57Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, I, I, I think about.

• 1:10:01Trevor Noah?

  You've made me one kid.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  I think about you more than you know. You to me.

• 1:10:06Trevor Noah?

  Your missus is not gonna like that.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:10:08Trevor Noah?

  Guys, cut that one.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's, no, here's the thing, right? Here's the thing, I view certain comedians as almost like, uh, you support Liverpool, right?

• 1:10:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  So, okay, I, I think you're Liverpool. Cause I met you early on, relatively early on in your international career, right?

• 1:10:25Trevor Noah?

  Definitely you did.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  And, and then I, I followed you through. And so you go, you go and you do these things and I watch it from a distance and I, I go, oh, he's doing the Grammys, oh, he's doing the Daily Show. Oh, he's, he's doing, like, you watch these things and you, you feel like, it's my guy. It's my guy's doing the thing and you, you love it. I can't, and I think, I was thinking about it, like coming here today, I was thinking, if your life was a movie,

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  what would people in the cinema be screaming at the screen?

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Right now? And they would be screaming?

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Have kids.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  The people that love you all see it like a mile off. Like, oh, you have to have kids.

• 1:11:11Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  You have to have kids. You have that thing where you, you, it feels like you would be a very good father.

• 1:11:18Trevor Noah?

  I would hope to be, I would hope. I mean, I, I grew up, I don't, I don't know your story, but like, one of the, you know, it's, I think of it in the same way I think of comedy sometimes.

• 1:11:30Trevor Noah?

  One of the reasons I love hanging out with Eugene is because sitting here in this chair is one of my favorite comedians in the whole world, like bar none. You're one of them. I can like count the comedians where I go, there's many comedians who are great, funny, talented, skillful, you name it. But there are some people where I go, you're one of my favorite individuals who are also comedians, like the, or the whole thing you embody for me. And when I'm in a conversation with you or when I'm watching you on stage is the same like level of joy for me. Like I'm sitting there with like my popcorn, just being like, do you, do you get what I'm saying? Daniel Kitson like is one of them.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Trevor Noah?

  He, he just like, he gives me this thing where I'm like, we went and played football once, I have never laughed more playing the game of football in my entire life. He like does commentary while he's like playing the game. He's like running, he's like, oh, wow, pass. Who's going, going down the wing? He's got, oh, what's that, another fizzing? And he, and he, but like the way he just is makes me, I go like, ah, it's, it feels like it is, it's, it's.

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  But is that not the, the aim of like being, like if you, to give anyone advice in life is like, do you?

• 1:12:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but, but, yes.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Suey generous, be, be like a non-fungible human is the best thing you could be.

• 1:12:43Trevor Noah?

  That's it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  You're an entirely non-fungible human.

• 1:12:45Trevor Noah?

  No, but I think you guys take for granted how much I, it's because I'm like enjoying, like a, like a flower, you know, basking in the rays of the sun. I, I watch this because you cannot always watch yourself. You cannot in life, you know? Mirrors are like a relatively new concept. If you look at our history as humans.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  No, but even mirrors, mirrors are very two D. You don't get to see how you're.

• 1:13:04Trevor Noah?

  That's what I mean.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  A room, like, like you've got a lot of charm and charm, I think is miss.

• 1:13:11Trevor Noah?

  I appreciate that, but I.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  But, okay.

• 1:13:13Trevor Noah?

  I don't know what, I don't know.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  You know what charm is? Charm isn't people like you. Charm is people think you would like them.

• 1:13:20Trevor Noah?

  But I do is my thing is like, so this is what, this is why I'm talking about the kids.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got zero charm.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  Plenty of that.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  I got zero charm. I got, I got charisma for days.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Boy's got plenty of that he does.

• 1:13:32Trevor Noah?

  No, so what I'm saying about the, the dad thing is this, okay? So when I, when I think of stand up, one of the, one of the things that gives me more joy than anything, I was, I was in Saratoga recently and driving up to the show and Santa Barbara as well, I was driving up to the show. The people walking in gives me more joy sometimes than the whole show because I look at them and I go, yo, these people, this is their night and this is their thing. And I go like, what a, what a joy and a privilege that they have gone, this is the thing that I wish to do on this night. And it's the thing that will, I even said to one of the audiences one night, I, I, because I saw them like on the street, there was a couple, they have like a, like an argument you could see, but then they walked and they came into the show. And then I said, I, I've never realized this.

• 1:14:14Trevor Noah?

  And I said, I wanna, I just wanna say thank you to every one of the couples who came here, even though you're fighting, because you booked the tickets when you're in a good mood. And I take for granted that on tonight, you have to come together. And I said, so I know right now you hate each other, but let's see how this, but I just wanna say, I just wanna say I appreciate you. And it was shocking how many people clapped, like it wasn't even a joke. They were just like, yeah, we do hate each other right now. And, and, and those small moments, I go, oh, I, I, I would love for you to leave this moment better than when we all came into it, myself included. Forget my day, forget your day, let's, let's walk out of this. I think the same thing for life and my mom always said this to me. She always said, not in like a financial way, she just said, oh, she said, Nana, my child, let every generation just be better than the previous one.

• 1:14:59Trevor Noah?

  Just, oh, let us just, just a little, let us beat some curses, let us. And so when I think of that, like fathers and all that, I go, all I wish for is to be the kind of dad where I go, the kind of dad I never had, where when I come home, like when a door opens or closes, my kid doesn't have to turn off the TV or doesn't have to like act like they're sleeping or doesn't have to, does that make sense?

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:15:25Trevor Noah?

  No, but I'm saying that's.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  No, I'm just saying in general.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  No, no, but that thing of like the.

• 1:15:28Trevor Noah?

  That's what I, that's what I would yearn for is just to be able to give that to somebody.

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the rough and tumble. And it's the different thing that dads bring, moms bring, moms are very kind to the child and dads are very kind to the potential.

• 1:15:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's fascinating.

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  It's a different, it's a different move. Like I, I don't wanna bring up good kids, I wanna bring up good adults.

• 1:15:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  And you can't, so you can't ever let your kids do anything that will embarrass you or, or that will, that you will resent.

• 1:15:54Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Because you have to love them. Don't think you want, so you have to kind of, they have to, you have to hold them to a standard where you go, we're all gonna have fun all the time, but there's, we got we got boundaries. You know, moms are very good at setting boundaries. Dads tend to be better at enforcing boundaries.

• 1:16:11Trevor Noah?

  Enforcing them, yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  And actually, you, you know what I mean, saying that, I'm gendering that, but actually it could be the mom and the dad, could be roles reversed.

• 1:16:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  But it's, but within the household.

• 1:16:19Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  Someone's good at setting them, someone's very good at going, no, no.

• 1:16:21Trevor Noah?

  Remember that this is the rule.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  That's how we do it.

• 1:16:23Trevor Noah?

  Someone chose eight P M bedtime and others like, hey, it's eight P M.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you better be in bed.

• 1:16:28Trevor Noah?

  And the other one is like, we're coming.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  It's that thing of like the, the, as you, as you speak about that and the audience and seeing them coming to the show or whatever, you go, it's the, it's the resume points. You have enough, I'm here to tell you, you have enough.

• 1:16:40Trevor Noah?

  No, I don't think, you see, it's funny, I don't think of it as resume points. What I'm thinking of is the, like, I do smaller shows now than I've ever done, which like, thank God my team like supports, but you know, you, you, you know what it's like? You, you, if you're lucky, you do well, people go, we want more tickets and there's more shows and it gets bigger and it gets bigger and it gets bigger. And sometimes I go like, ah, this has gotten so big that it is, it is no longer, or it's starting to lose the feeling that I originally loved, which was I touch you and you touch me in a very intimate way. When it gets very big, it feels like you watch me and I tell you. And I, you know.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I started, I, when I play the bigger rooms, I mean, this is getting off the, the tangent of, I'm gonna push you on the fatherhood thing, but the, if I play a really big room, I now play it in the round. I learned it from Chappelle, I was doing gigs with Chappelle in, uh, what was it? Uh, Australia, he invited me up, I had like one night off from my tour in Australia and he was playing that night, so I went, oh yeah, I'll come and open for you. And he played, and you walk in the room, the arena like a boxer, like up onto the stage, you have the stage in the middle and you have fourteen thousand people around you, rather than being at one end and you're playing to them and there, and some people have shitty seats, everyone's got a good seat.

• 1:17:59Trevor Noah?

  It does shorten the further seat from that.

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  And then you just rotate in that room and that's the, that's the way to do it.

• 1:18:05Trevor Noah?

  Okay, that's, yeah, that's a way to like.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  That's the secret sauce.

• 1:18:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's a way to break it smaller.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  The thing that you don't realize from that is that the people that are watching you can see past you, people laughing on the other side.

• 1:18:15Trevor Noah?

  Other, that's actually amazing.

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  That's fantastic.

• 1:18:17Trevor Noah?

  That's a good reason to do it, actually.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's a great reason to do it.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Why did I play, I played the, is it the, I think it might be the, it's in Phoenix, Arizona, maybe the, the Majestic Theater, do you know it?

• 1:18:27Trevor Noah?

  No, not familiar with it.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  A couple, I think George Carlin filmed his very famous, um, seven words you can't say on television there, it's that special.

• 1:18:34Trevor Noah?

  In the round.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  It's phenomenal, but it's a really small room in the round, it's like two thousand.

• 1:18:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, normally, normally they're not, they're not that big.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:18:41Trevor Noah?

  So when, when you were becoming a dad, was there a part of you that was ever worried that you would be the dad that you had?

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  I, I didn't wanna be a dad for the longest time because I didn't wanna be my father. And then you were like, no, no, no, I'll make my own mistakes. I got mistakes for days.

• 1:18:55Trevor Noah?

  Um, what was it, what was it about him that you didn't wanna repeat? Like what, what?

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I mean, he's, he's, he's not great, but look, the, the thing about like pregnancy makes a baby.

• 1:19:06Trevor Noah?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  But it also makes a mother. And a father isn't blessed in the same way.

• 1:19:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  We don't go through the same transformation, but it's, you, you, so you, you, people are waiting around thinking, well, I'm gonna wait until I feel like a man and then I'm gonna have some kids.

• 1:19:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  And then you have kids and you go, oh, no, it's, this is, this is a verb, this isn't a noun.

• 1:19:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  This is a doing thing.

• 1:19:28Trevor Noah?

  Beautiful.

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  I'm here to do the rough and tumble play.

• 1:19:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  Like I love the, the, the, the, the kind of, because you, you want your kids to get, you know, it's, it's, it's bruises, not scars.

• 1:19:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  You, you want them to kind of have that fun and the, to be, to be the fun one in the house. And the, it's, it's, it's the most wonderful thing. I went out to lunch with a, with a friend who's maybe the brightest guy I know. He's Eric Weinstein, do you know him?

• 1:19:56Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  He's a very, very clever guy, physicist. And I was talking about how much I love being a father and he kind of stopped me, he grabbed my arm and he went, you will die and you will be reborn as someone else and you will love them.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  And I kind of went, oh, I, oh, I sort of get what reincarnation is now. I kind of get what it is. And there's this lovely crossover period of thirty or forty years where you get to be with the next version.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  So beautiful.

• 1:20:28Trevor Noah?

  I would never think of you as somebody who would like adopt or accept that type of philosophy because I've always seen you as somebody, like you said at the beginning of this conversation, you're atheist. I wouldn't think of Jimmy as being spiritual.

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it.

• 1:20:39Trevor Noah?

  What changed?

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Well, I think that thing about going, it's the opposite of faith isn't doubt. It's certainty.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  And I'm not certain about anything. You know, I'm full of doubts, but the idea that you go to throw out everything spiritual because you don't have a religion, it seems to be crazy to me.

• 1:21:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  So there's two kinds of, you know, people, some people believe in fairy stories, I don't. And some people believe all religion is nonsense. I don't think church works because God is happy. I think church works because people come together.

• 1:21:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  And decide.

• 1:21:20Trevor Noah?

  And interesting, that is what the Bible says, when three or more gathered in my name.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Three?

• 1:21:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and there's actually science behind that, funny enough.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  So it's just the two of us, nothing?

• 1:21:29Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, but there's actually science.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  If I wasn't here, this would be some bullshit.

• 1:21:33Trevor Noah?

  But that's, that's, but that's like the interesting thing about like, is like.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  Three?

• 1:21:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but some of these things, yeah, but some of these things show you science is like the science behind it, like group dynamic, when it's one person in a room, two people, once it gets to three people, something happens that you can't even explain. It just happens when there's a third body. It just happens.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Trevor Noah?

  And, and you know what I think it is sometimes? I think it's even the passive effect of an audience. So let's say you and I are having a conversation like this. There is like now, when I was talking to Jimmy, you were listening to us.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Trevor Noah?

  You're with us right here, but you were listening. When you two were talking, I was listening. And then we said, you laughed, I laughed when you two were talking. That thing doesn't exist when there's two people in the same way, because you can't always be listening in the same way. You can't, two people can make a conversation. A third person can then watch that conversation that is being had by the two people. And we sometimes take that for granted. And that third person can influence the conversation with how they're listening to it and responding to it in a way that you don't appreciate.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  And bacteria, petri dish and a scientist above.

• 1:22:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, it just becomes like a, oh, wow, oh, wow.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  Getting something and then something happens, changes, something changes, something changes.

• 1:22:41Trevor Noah?

  So it's interesting that even, even in the Bible, it basically talks about the power of the group. And people might just skip over that, but it's like when three or more gathered in my name.

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  No, but haven't we, haven't we?

• 1:22:52Trevor Noah?

  I will be there.

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  I think we've, I think we've oversold for the, the individual in our society.

• 1:22:57Trevor Noah?

  Ah, definitely.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  And the, and the idea that you go, even identity wise, people think that they are within their own skin. Our identities are dispersed.

• 1:23:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  Right? So, so you are different with me than you are with Eugene, than you are with your mother, than you are. But also, the, the, the thing that you don't know yet is who you are as a father. You don't know what you're like as a dad. You haven't met that person yet.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you haven't met.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  And much as you will love your kids, you will fucking love yourself as a father.

• 1:23:30Trevor Noah?

  That is fascinating.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  It's a whole new way of being. It's a, and you don't, you don't know.

• 1:23:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  You won't know, you're like, like, your favorite people in the world, the people you feel most comfortable with, the people that you, you can be yourself with, right?

• 1:23:44Trevor Noah?

  He tells, he tells me this all the time.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  And kids will see you as a combination of all the personalities you've tried out.

• 1:23:49Trevor Noah?

  You've told me this all the time.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  I've told him this all the time, yeah.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  Well, here's the, here's the real responsibility as well. The internal monologue in your head,

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  that's your parents. The responsibility to know that's who you are to your kids, you will be the internal monologue that they have for the rest of their lives. It's a, it's a, it's a weight to carry.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  It's an amazing place to be. Yeah. It, it tests you, it challenges you, but it also allows you to give yourself so much grace. When you see kids making mistakes and you know it's not final. If they spill something on the carpet, you're like, that's in their world, that's the ultimate thing that could have gone wrong.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  Their juice out of the cup into the carpet.

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  Father, that moment is so painful, bro.

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Yes, to them, that's like.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  Yo, that's their life savings.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Five million dollars.

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  In a, in a, in a company that went belly up.

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  Hey, we've all done it.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  The, but that's like, it's Buddhist, right? It's, what do they say? Equanimity with impermanence. Like, the cup's already broken.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  The, the, everyone's already dead.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, make peace with that.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do I want to do?

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  You enjoy, you enjoy the now.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  Enjoy, like a lot of mental health, I think, is the now.

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 00

  Depression is the past.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  Anxiety is the future. Right now, you're okay.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Trevor Noah?

  I love that. That's beautiful, the idea of like you learning grace because you're watching them sort of not have grace for themselves in those moments.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  But you learn so much from kids. It's almost those, kids will always have an outfit that they love. And they can't accept that they've grown out of it.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  So are we talking about this?

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  No, because you, no, but you are, you are, you are dressed like a toddler.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yo, man, this guy gets shots fired.

• 1:25:34Speaker 00

  I got, I got, I got a six-year-old I wouldn't put in that outfit.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  Do you know what?

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  I go, no, wear something with a collar, we're going out.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  And the jacket.

• 1:25:41Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what this guy just did? Have you watched those, you know, those, if you watch those mob movies? Where the movie's just trundling along calmly, everyone's having a great time, they're doing things, they're doing things. All of a sudden, they go, hey, Billy, you want to come for a drive? We're going for a drive. Everyone's a good time. Out of nowhere, you even as an audience member are sitting there enjoying the movie. So you know, I was thinking, bah, oh, shit, oh, shit.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you guys, that's what I just did to me. You're in a coupe de ville and all of a sudden there's fucking brains in the glass.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  And then Jimmy's wiping his gun off. I'm like, Jimmy, what did you do to Eugene? What did you do to Eugene? He's like, we had to do something about that outfit. I had to do something. It was coming, it was a long time coming, Trev. I'm like, no, Jimmy. Someone had to say.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  I'm coming in blood right now, Jimmy. I'm coming in blood right now, Jimmy.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  What a shot fired out of nowhere, bro.

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  There's something nice about the out of nowhere.

• 1:26:34Trevor Noah?

  That's the great.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  There's something like they've done nothing. They're just quietly sitting in the front row and then suddenly, what? What just happened?

• 1:26:39Trevor Noah?

  Catching strays, my friend.

• 1:26:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Trevor Noah?

  And you hear, and you hear that, yeah, he's like.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, catching strays. So kids, kids will teach you that. They'll be like, I want to put this on, I want to put this on. You're like, no, it doesn't fit anymore. Then they'll be like, yeah, but I still like it. They're like, no, you have to get something else. Then you have to convince them that something else is good for them. Then that's your job. They, they trust you. Then they'll believe you when you say something else is good for them. Because this thing that they've grown to love and find comfort in, doesn't work anymore for them. But as an adult, you take longer to understand that.

• 1:27:11Speaker 00

  The whole, the language of it. I love the language of it. I was thinking about it when you were talking about Star Wars earlier. Because my, my kid, uh, my boy hasn't seen Star Wars. Too scary.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  Hold.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  He's like six, but it's, whatever. We're pretty strict with screens or whatever. We're not, we don't fuck with that. So the idea, but he calls him, he's been on some of the rides at Disney, so he calls him, it's Darth Vader.

• 1:27:30Trevor Noah?

  I like that.

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  And the American Falcon. And someone tried to correct him. I went, no, no, no, no.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  Leave it.

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  No, once he gets that right, he'll never get it wrong again.

• 1:27:38Trevor Noah?

  And you love it every single time.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  I love, I'm enjoying the, but like, he likes to wear a shirt, like a, a long sleeve.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  He calls it down sleeves.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  And someone tried to correct him in the store. I went, no, obviously we're sticking with down sleeves for as long as we possibly can. This is joyful.

• 1:27:55Trevor Noah?

  And I mean, down sleeves is a great name for it.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  Perfect name.

• 1:27:57Trevor Noah?

  Because, because long doesn't really tell us, long in relation to down, I like actually more.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  It's good.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  I think it's actually got a good theory, because if you're wearing shorts, they say you're wearing shorts. But if you're wearing trousers, they never say you're wearing longs.

• 1:28:10Trevor Noah?

  I actually like this a lot.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, could, could change things.

• 1:28:12Trevor Noah?

  You just made me, you just made me sad that, that most people wouldn't, no, no, no, for, for people who won't. We're living in a world where fewer people are having kids and fewer people can have kids. And I wonder what, what society as a whole is going to be robbed of when people cannot have these magical experiences that you're talking about.

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the, the best stuff in life is available to everyone, right? It's weird how the very rich and the very poor, both have tons of kids.

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  Isn't that weird? The poorest person you know that lives in a trailer park.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Slums, yeah.

• 1:28:46Speaker 00

  Tons of kids.

• 1:28:46Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  And the richest person you know, tons of kids.

• 1:28:49Trevor Noah?

  Tons of kids.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  But the middle class is squeezed. It's really, it's a societal thing, because as we moved from the countryside, like two hundred years ago, everyone's a farmer.

• 1:28:58Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Everyone now lives in cities. Kids went from being an asset to a liability. Right? In the city, kids are a liability. In the countryside, it was like, I've got eight kids.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  The farmhands.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, farmhands, great, they're, they're working hard.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  They'll, they'll be in soon. That thing of like, it changed. So, and we need to rebalance that, because the, the future belongs to whoever shows up for it.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  And I say this all the time. And I'm, I say this, I always say, the middle class that can afford to have, some can't, they're middle class, but they can't afford, they, they have so much to offer to these kids. People have five-bedroom houses that are not occupied. People have all these experiences, all these excesses, but no one to give it to.

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  Who's the great guy that said, Warren Farrell, um, who was great in the feminist movement in the late sixties. And he's kind of, he wrote The Myth of Male Power. So he's like, he's like, people think he's kind of men's movement. I think he's a brilliant man. He said this thing, kids want your time more than they want your dime.

• 1:29:53Trevor Noah?

  There we go.

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  I thought it was a great line. He's got a great story. You wanna hear a great story about? Okay, so.

• 1:29:59Trevor Noah?

  I'm a guy who likes great stories.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  Alright, so this guy Warren Farrell, he's working as a therapist in the late sixties. He's in New York. He's where we are now. And this guy comes to him and he's a wealthy man. He says, I'm very rich, uh, I'm involved in a big business and I have regrets about how I live my life. And Warren Farrell goes, okay, well, tell me what's going on. He said, well, I had a first wife and I didn't spend any time with her. I was away, working all the time. And I had a kid. I didn't really connect with the kid. I just wasn't there and I feel terrible about it. And um, my girl is pregnant. And what should I do? And Warren Farrell like talks to the guy and he goes, well, you, you, there's no point

• 1:30:46Speaker 00

  having money if you're not gonna do what you want with your life, right? So what do you wanna do? He said, well, I wanna give up everything and just be a father, just be there for the kid. Warren Farrell goes, okay, well, that's what you should do. Do that. So he does. He shuts down the business and he sits with the kid for like five, first five years of his life. And he just bakes bread and hangs out in the house and he's like a dad. Well, no one was like a full-time dad. He was a full-time dad. And the story gets interesting when I tell you the guy was John Lennon.

• 1:31:23Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  And no one knew that five years after that.

• 1:31:29Trevor Noah?

  You'd uh?

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  He'd get shot in the face. He would never have that time again.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  And he took that time to be with his kid, to hang out.

• 1:31:48Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  Give yourself that gift.

• 1:31:58Trevor Noah?

  I think we always assume that

• 1:32:04Trevor Noah?

  the time is promised to us.

• 1:32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Trevor Noah?

  Because our obligations have claimed their time. We always assume that the things we actually want for ourselves will also claim their time. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Trevor Noah?

  Your, your work, your debts, your everything, they've claimed their time well in advance. They're like, oh, here's your payments. This is how it's gonna work. You're like, twenty years? Yeah, you'll be paying for this house for twenty. The bank has, banks claimed its time, you know what I mean?

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Trevor Noah?

  Everything. And so I think because of that, sometimes as people, we assume because the things that we owe, whether it's time, money, whatever, because they've claimed their time. We then, I think, assume that the things we want.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  Have no time.

• 1:32:47Trevor Noah?

  Will also be able to, will also be able to claim their time. But that's not, what you just said to me.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  But it's, it's you. It's also, you know, you're, you're a good boy. You love your mum.

• 1:32:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 00

  You wanna get her a present? You wanna get her a gift she'll care about?

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  Jimmy was sent here as a spy.

• 1:33:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  My mum sent Jimmy to this podcast.

• 1:33:08Speaker 00

  Deep undercover.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  But it looks off judging my outfit. Looks like my mum sent you to this podcast too. Jimmy was sent by both of our mums.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  Well, I think your mother's here somewhere. I think she's still dressing you. I'm pretty convinced.

• 1:33:23Trevor Noah?

  Why are you always dressed so sharp, by the way?

• 1:33:25Speaker 00

  I, I, I like, it became like a thing of.

• 1:33:27Trevor Noah?

  Is this also like an English thing, like an English?

• 1:33:29Speaker 00

  I don't think it is a particularly English thing, but I mean, I, I love my, uh, my tailor is, um, it's Tom Sweeney I go to and he's one of my best friends, Luke.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a tailor name.

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  He's the best. I just, I love spending time with him. I love the whole thing of like going and buying a suit. The, the ritual of it, going into the store, hanging out with the guys. I'll shoot some pool, we'll pick some fabrics, we'll, it's just.

• 1:33:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, this sounds like, this sounds like Peaky Blinders in my head. It's like the image I have right now.

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  It's kind of, it's, the boys are very, they're very good.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  You look at other people's suits and go, whoa, whose one is that one? What, what is that?

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  I, I, I look at American men in suits and think, hilarious. Hilarious. Uh, that, I don't know who that was made for, but not you, clearly. Like, I like to come correct. It's also that thing of like on stage, I think that thing about wearing a suit and a tie. For me, it feels like a mark of respect for the audience. Different, different people sort of see themselves in different ways. But also, it, it speaks to character and reputation. I, I'm, I'm, character is what you know about yourself. Reputation is what the rest of the world sees.

• 1:34:30Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  And people perceive me in a, in a three-piece suit and a tie. Fine, great. I'll lean into that.

• 1:34:38Trevor Noah?

  Okay. It also suits you though.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  Very much so.

• 1:34:40Trevor Noah?

  It really suits your vibe.

• 1:34:43Trevor Noah?

  Uh, like, I don't know what it is, but it's like, you know, when like, it, it, the thing just like suits you. Every comedian has their thing.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  You can't imagine anything else.

• 1:34:49Trevor Noah?

  I can't, I can't. And I also think there's something about like, when, I remember the first time I watched you and you like, this guy's up there in a suit telling one-liners. You, it makes you even feel like an assassin in a suit feels even more dangerous.

• 1:35:05Trevor Noah?

  You know, so if I see like a movie and there's an assassin and they're wearing T-shirts, I'm like, alright.

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  They look like they know what they're doing.

• 1:35:09Trevor Noah?

  No, you kill people. But an assassin in a suit, I'm like, oh, don't mess with this guy.

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Trevor Noah?

  He's gonna kill people wearing a three-piece suit.

• 1:35:17Speaker 00

  I think that.

• 1:35:18Trevor Noah?

  He knows his, you know what I mean?

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  You know, going to the theatre and like someone's put on a bit of a show. Like, I would think like, your, your production design as, as a comedian is whatever you, whatever you've got on here. That's what people are looking at. So it's like, you don't need a big show. It's like, that's it, that's the set design. I bought a suit. Well done, everyone. Nice, a new tie.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  Do you love my set?

• 1:35:40Trevor Noah?

  Maybe you wanna, maybe you wanna wear suits again. Maybe you wanna wear suits again.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  Huh?

• 1:35:44Trevor Noah?

  I'll try it a bit. I'll, that's all I wore when I first started, remember?

• 1:35:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:48Trevor Noah?

  Terrible suits.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Hey, some of them, you look like an evangelist.

• 1:35:51Trevor Noah?

  Terrible, some of them. You're even being kind to me because you're my friend.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  My favorite one was that shiny.

• 1:35:56Trevor Noah?

  The shiny silver one?

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, foil, tin foil looking.

• 1:35:59Trevor Noah?

  Oh my goodness.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  Oh man, that suit for me was like, yeah, no, this guy.

• 1:36:02Trevor Noah?

  It shimmied, was like baggy and it shimmied and it's like massive fat tie in the middle and.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  With a big collar.

• 1:36:08Trevor Noah?

  Huge shoulder pads and ah, but I was loving it.

• 1:36:11Speaker 00

  It's weird the way like it hasn't changed much in the last kind of fifty years. Like, I could pretty much, like, whether I'm, like, smart or casual, I could pretty much dress as JFK on any given day.

• 1:36:24Trevor Noah?

  Yes, you could. Yeah, you could.

• 1:36:26Speaker 00

  You know the deal with JFK, uh, the fashion-wise?

• 1:36:29Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, his guys were called the men without hats.

• 1:36:32Trevor Noah?

  I've heard that term, but I didn't know it was for his.

• 1:36:34Speaker 00

  So when, when he came up, um, when he was running for office, none of his guys wore hats. He didn't wear a hat. Everyone wore hats. And he came along and he didn't wear a hat. And suddenly the hat business went from being a large industry to nothing in like two years. When he got elected, it was suddenly like, oh no, hats are for old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy dudes.

• 1:36:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:57Speaker 00

  Modern, new people.

• 1:36:58Trevor Noah?

  This was in America.

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  This was JFK, yeah.

• 1:37:02Trevor Noah?

  Add a new suspect to the list?

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  The hat industry.

• 1:37:05Trevor Noah?

  Hey.

• 1:37:07Trevor Noah?

  You must always look at who benefits or who had a grievance with the person.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  So you think, you think the Zagrouba tape might have been someone on a grassy knoll wearing a hat?

• 1:37:16Trevor Noah?

  What did they shoot on his body?

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  His head? Yeah.

• 1:37:22Trevor Noah?

  I'm not saying that this is conf, I'm just saying if I'm a detective, I've found a new lead.

• 1:37:26Speaker 00

  Okay, the hat industry. And those people are famously crazy because they work with mercury.

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  And the beavers were happy.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  Mad as a hatter, comes from that.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  I'm sure the beavers were like, yeah, let's, we're seeing a resurgence. Let's have more kids, guys.

• 1:37:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  No one's after our pals anymore.

• 1:37:43Trevor Noah?

  Don't press anything. We've got more. What now? After this? What's a conspiracy theory you do believe?

• 1:37:50Speaker 00

  A conspiracy theory?

• 1:37:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that you do believe.

• 1:37:52Speaker 00

  Uh, alright. Here's.

• 1:37:55Trevor Noah?

  Even if it's one of your own.

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Two terrifying scenarios.

• 1:37:57Trevor Noah?

  Cool.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  Okay, so the first is, there's a Manhattan project currently underway in America. And they're building a, uh, a doomsday machine. And it's called Solstice and it's, um, uh, artificial general intelligence, okay? Trillions of dollars are being spent on building this. Somewhere in America, we don't know where, but it's siloed off and they're building this. Second terrifying scenario.

• 1:38:31Speaker 00

  They're not.

• 1:38:37Trevor Noah?

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• 1:39:05Trevor Noah?

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• 1:39:11Trevor Noah?

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• 1:39:56Trevor Noah?

  If therapy's been sitting in the back of your mind, Rula is a pretty simple way to take that first step. So, turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com. That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

• 1:40:13Speaker 03

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• 1:40:47Trevor Noah?

  Yo, by the way, what's, uh, what's happening in England these days?

• 1:40:50Speaker 00

  In England?

• 1:40:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because I like asking, no, no, just like I like asking people this because, um, when you're not in a country, uh, or if you live between countries, you learn very quickly. The stories being told about a country are not felt in the same way or they're being painted in a different way than the people are experiencing it in the country. And I wonder like, like what's happening in, in England these days?

• 1:41:11Speaker 00

  I, I don't know. I mean, it feels, it's a very interesting time at the moment.

• 1:41:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  In the UK because it's kind of, there was the Brexit thing and then we didn't really leave. And the country's in, it's, it's, we've had like seven prime ministers in ten years.

• 1:41:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  And there's political stagnation. The new guy, I wish him well, Andy Burnham's come in. And he's, he's capped bus fares at two pounds. And it's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Like the economy is not going well, that, that the country's not going well and no one quite knows what to do. And it seems to me like no one has like the big ideas on how to change Great Britain. And they, it's, it seems relatively simple, but people don't want to do it. Like they don't want to grasp the nettle.

• 1:41:58Trevor Noah?

  What, what do you, what do you think the simple is?

• 1:42:01Speaker 00

  I always think they're like, there's no silver bullet.

• 1:42:04Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:04Speaker 00

  There's no, I'm, I'm a big follower of this guy called Roger Bootle.

• 1:42:07Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  Who writes, he's an economist who writes very good papers about what to do. And he's, he, he did this great paper, which was like eight examples around the world of like different economies that have done different things.

• 1:42:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Speaker 00

  I think if you, if you want to sort out Britain, you can't, certain things are necessary, but not sufficient.

• 1:42:23Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  So if it, if it was me, if I was in charge, I would devalue the currency by twenty percent.

• 1:42:29Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:42:30Speaker 00

  And I would do it on purpose and I would be open about it. And the reason is it would make your holiday more expensive. But I don't care about the two weeks a year when you go on holiday overseas. I care about the other fifty weeks of the year. And if you want to rebalance the country, you have to increase the manufacturing industry.

• 1:42:46Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  And the reason the pound is very high is because of the city of London. But, but London is like a really rich city.

• 1:42:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Speaker 00

  And it's surrounded by quite a poor country.

• 1:42:55Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  You want that redistribution. You want people to, to have more. You, you need to make things.

• 1:42:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you do need to make things.

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  And then energy, we have the highest energy prices in the world, I believe. Uh, it's four times higher than it is in America.

• 1:43:07Trevor Noah?

  Jeez.

• 1:43:08Speaker 00

  And really, all I would, all I aspire to be is as good as nineteen seventies France. In nineteen, nineteen seventies to the mid eighties, France built fifty-six nuclear reactors. They now have the cheapest energy in, in Europe. So, so they don't give a fuck what the Russians say because they don't import the gas. They make their own energy. And you go, well, that's a very, they're like, that takes twelve, fifteen years to, yeah, it takes, it takes a statesman, not a politician. Politicians are on a four, five year cycle.

• 1:43:36Trevor Noah?

  The French have always been good at that though. If you look at their history, like, like if, if you look at how the, like Paris itself, how it was built, if you look at the ideas. Many French leaders built beyond themselves, thought like they, and then the, the person who would follow on from them carried it on in a strange, like you don't always see that.

• 1:43:52Speaker 00

  But that thing of like the, the statesman is, is planting a tree whose shade you will never enjoy.

• 1:43:56Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:43:57Speaker 00

  It's that kind of thing. And then we've got kind of crazy levels of regulation in the UK that just need, you just need to kind of pare it back. A little bit, you need to make it a bit simpler. Like if you look at China compared to, uh, America or Britain, right? They've covered their nation in high-speed rail.

• 1:44:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 00

  And we've covered ours in environmental reports. Why? Was because China is run by engineers and we're run by lawyers.

• 1:44:21Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:22Speaker 00

  And everything can't be run by lawyers. You know, you have to get some shit done. But it's, you know, and then the last thing is, you know, taxation, I think is, is, is very interesting. The idea that we haven't, um, we, we left Europe and then we never, we never took the benefit. You know, Ireland, where my people are from, have lower corporation tax than anywhere else in Europe. So all of the anthropics, all of the companies, all the big tech companies base themselves in Dublin. And Dublin and Ireland does very well out of the tax revenue from there. Well, I don't want to be a dick about it, but I would undercut them by two percent.

• 1:44:58Trevor Noah?

  Bring it over here. But don't you think it didn't become like a race to the bottom? Aren't you, aren't you worried about?

• 1:45:02Speaker 00

  You have to be in competition with the rest of the world. You have to, like, uh, the real politics is you, you're in competition with every other country.

• 1:45:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Speaker 00

  And different places have different specialties, right?

• 1:45:12Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:45:12Speaker 00

  Why would you want to live there? Why would you want to live here? Where do you want to be?

• 1:45:15Trevor Noah?

  And I feel like the tax guys, I feel like the tax guys have tricked us in, and all these corporations have tricked us tax-wise because what they've done is they've made it a cat and mouse game where they make everyone, offer everyone a lower tax rate. But all they're always going to do is keep moving. And if you, if everyone bends to their whims, at the end of it, everyone has just bent themselves out of actually being a place where you want to be or not. What, because, because here's what I mean. Okay. It's like, think, think of, think of this. And I'm not an economist, so this is how I think of it in the world is, let's say you went to a bodega here in New York. And you got there and you said, how much for this bottle of water? And they said, four dollars. And you're like, ah, the other bodega is gonna give it to me for three seventy.

• 1:45:59Trevor Noah?

  And then he's like, all right, I'll give it to you for three seventy. And then you leave and you go to the next bodega and you're like, oh, they give it to me three seventy. He's like, I'll give it to you.

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  So it becomes an infinite bid.

• 1:46:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it, it can become an infinite bid. Now, I know an economist will tell me, yeah, but supply, demand, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I know it's complicated in tax, but I just feel like sometimes I think the race is the wrong way around. I know this is a little kumbaya of me, but I think if countries found a way to come together and the same way they have like international crime agreements. I think if they did a better job of having international tax agreements, then that wouldn't be able. It's weird to me that when I'm in Europe, when I'm in London, I catch an Uber and I get charged by Uber Amsterdam. I think that's weird. Because, because the Uber is in London, Uber is in the UK. I even think this in South Africa, like.

• 1:46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46Trevor Noah?

  One of the things that worries me the most in South Africa now is if you are a South African company and you advertise on Facebook.

• 1:46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Trevor Noah?

  And it's necessary for you, you know, you need to advertise where the people are.

• 1:46:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:46:58Trevor Noah?

  You're gonna advertise on Facebook, you're gonna advertise on Google, all of these things. The money doesn't stay in South Africa, but you're a South African business. Think about that.

• 1:47:06Speaker 00

  Advertising to South Africa.

• 1:47:07Trevor Noah?

  You're a South African business, advertising South African products to South Africans. But the money that you pay for that advertising, back in the day, would go to a South African advertising company, a South African platform, a South African billboard, a South African, and for me, I believe money is just like water. You want to keep it flowing. You know, it's gonna start somewhere, it's gonna flow. And then you want it to evaporate and go back up and then rain back down and then freeze and then come down. That's a healthy system, right?

• 1:47:36Speaker 00

  Money is upstream of the things that we want. We say we want more money for people, but really what do we want? We want more healthcare, education and better nutrition.

• 1:47:46Trevor Noah?

  That's exactly it, yeah.

• 1:47:47Speaker 00

  The problem is, I'd love to run for politics, but in nineteen eighty,

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  I want to go back and be able to promise what we have now in nineteen eighty. The problem is the worst kind of inflation in the world is expectation inflation, right? And there's another word for expectation inflation. It's progress. People want more. We get used to shit being good really fast. But we want like a level for everyone. We want everyone to be at the level of kind of abundance.

• 1:48:12Trevor Noah?

  A decent level.

• 1:48:13Speaker 00

  A decent level, but you can't keep moving the goalposts.

• 1:48:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Speaker 00

  And for me, it's about desires as opposed to kind of memetic desires. Like, what's the example? Like, uh, a Ford car and a Ferrari do the same job. They'll get you from A to B.

• 1:48:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Speaker 00

  But one of them has like, uh, metaphysical value. It's like what you think it says about you as a person and you're adventurous and sporty and da, da, da, whatever. Uh, but one of them's just functional. Like, provide the functional stuff for everyone.

• 1:48:42Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 00

  And then above that, you know, the, the people are gonna be.

• 1:48:45Trevor Noah?

  We've done that badly with education and healthcare, right? But that's what I'm, that's what I'm trying to say. That's why I'm saying, that's why I worry that the race will go to the bottom. Because if, if we are not careful, I think what will happen is the UK, let's say, will undercut Ireland. Oh, we'll give you less tax rate. Well, and as the people come there and then we, we've seen this happen.

• 1:49:06Trevor Noah?

  Corporations, companies, factories. The only reason we have weekends off is because workers had to fight for it.

• 1:49:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, the unions.

• 1:49:13Trevor Noah?

  Let's never forget that as an idea.

• 1:49:15Speaker 00

  People don't, people forget the unions gave us that. People forget the reasons for things.

• 1:49:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  People talk about the New Deal, like the New Deal just happened, just like Roosevelt came in, had the New Deal. You know when the New Deal happened? Because of labor riots that were brutal.

• 1:49:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Speaker 00

  People think Pearl Harbor happened out the blue. Pearl Harbor didn't happen out the blue. America cut off its oil supply. So it had a choice. It could, it could, it could collapse or it could go for an unwinnable war. And it couldn't, it couldn't face backing down. You know, it's like, it's a weird thing of like, knowing the history is really interesting. And we're, I think, you know, Britain, it's interesting, but we live in very interesting times. Like the bigger picture, I think we're living in a revolution.

• 1:49:55Trevor Noah?

  I agree with you.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  Depends how you define revolution, but I define a revolution as the replacement of elites. And the elites are being replaced. Think about like the medical profession post-COVID, people don't trust it.

• 1:50:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Speaker 00

  People don't trust politicians in a way that they used to. People don't trust academics, academia.

• 1:50:11Trevor Noah?

  We don't, we don't trust institutions. People don't trust institutions.

• 1:50:14Speaker 00

  And, and the bubbling up of not trusting institutions, what's the first sign of that? Conspiracy theories.

• 1:50:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Speaker 00

  Conspiracy theories are a symptom of a large problem, which is we don't trust the, yeah, the, the institutions. So we're just, we're scrabbling around. But I read a lot of Neil Howe, you've read that guy?

• 1:50:29Trevor Noah?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:50:30Speaker 00

  He wrote that, he wrote that book called The Fourth Turning.

• 1:50:32Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:50:33Speaker 00

  About how history moves in like eighty year cycles.

• 1:50:36Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yes, I have read that. Yes, actually, I have read that.

• 1:50:38Speaker 00

  And the, the idea that you go, the foundation myth of our culture is World War Two. Like Western culture is World War Two.

• 1:50:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:45Speaker 00

  So we're the goodies, they're the baddies, we did this. And it's falling away. You can see it, like statues of Churchill are being torn down, right? So, and you go, so that myth is kind of fading because it's the, the, the, people don't remember it. People that were there are all gone.

• 1:50:57Trevor Noah?

  Less and less of a meaning now.

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  So you go, so, you know, civilization is a clearing in the forest. We're going to have to relitigate everything. It's not like we can cope without institutions.

• 1:51:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  We just need new institutions. And at the moment, like politically what's happening, like the, the post-modernists. It's, that's, it's a, it's a war on truth.

• 1:51:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19Speaker 00

  And we can live without truth, if I'm honest. We live without truth pretty easily, but we can't live without trust.

• 1:51:26Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:26Speaker 00

  And we need truth to make trust. And trust is, that's the, that's the fundamental.

• 1:51:32Trevor Noah?

  And trust is very delicate. I think, I think it's, so to me, one of the, one of the reasons it's happening is because, because of what you said earlier. We are catering to audiences of one. I remember talking to, um, uh, Marques Brownlee, MKBHD. We were just chatting about this and he was talking about it like amongst big YouTubers and YouTube in general. And he said, everyone talks about this race to the audience of one. If you look at your world and your entertainment and your information, we're now living in a world where it is all specifically for you. You, you do not have to be in friction. You do not have to share, you do not have to.

• 1:52:16Trevor Noah?

  And if it's not for your friends, if it weren't for them, if, think about how many things you've shown me, taught me, shared with me, that I, I wouldn't otherwise, Neil Brennan sends me stuff all the time, I talk to him. But it's like those things, have you seen this? Have you done this? If we, if it weren't for that, we literally now would live in ideological silos and truth silos.

• 1:52:36Speaker 00

  Well, here's, here's.

• 1:52:36Trevor Noah?

  Because there's no other world anymore.

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  Here's my, here's my take on this, right? So, so we gathered round the fire for, I don't know, two, three hundred thousand years, maybe longer. We gathered around the fire and we talk, okay? And then we bought TV sets. No, we bought radios first, right? Radios and we gathered round the wireless, the radio, and we listened to it and we talked. And then we bought TVs and TV, it's kind of like a, a proxy for a fire and we watched that together. And then we turn it off.

• 1:53:02Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:03Speaker 00

  And whatever it was, whatever mum was watching, we were watching.

• 1:53:05Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:06Speaker 00

  And then we talked about it and we moved on.

• 1:53:07Trevor Noah?

  And TV ended.

• 1:53:08Speaker 00

  And suddenly.

• 1:53:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, finished. There was a time where, yeah.

• 1:53:12Speaker 00

  We're doing this and we're in separate rooms.

• 1:53:15Speaker 00

  And why do people want to go to festivals and comedy shows and things now?

• 1:53:18Trevor Noah?

  That's what I mean.

• 1:53:18Speaker 00

  Because we miss that connect.

• 1:53:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Speaker 00

  Like that, that, uh, we, we have this dispersed identity, we have to kind of come together. I, I don't know. I'm, I presume that we, we relitigate, we reinvent everything now. Everything gets recreated, but we've been, we've been in tougher times than this before. When you look back, my, I'm very pessimistic in the short term and very optimistic in the long term.

• 1:53:40Trevor Noah?

  I like that.

• 1:53:42Speaker 00

  Like we, we have to get through this little precipice, but if we do.

• 1:53:46Trevor Noah?

  Good times. Yeah, man. That's why, that's why I love, that's when we're going back to appreciating it. Those are the things that I look at, is I go, I'm not just here doing a show, thinking of, oh, the resume. I've started to think of comedy and anything that I do, anything that we do. I go like, what is this also a part of? What do I wish to try and like contribute to? And what do I wish was in my world? And how do I, do, do, do you get what I'm saying? Because I, because I genuinely think it makes a huge, listen to what you said. Ah, when I was at the Taylor Swift show, it has left something with you that'll connect you to other people, by the way, that you maybe otherwise wouldn't have been connected with.

• 1:54:23Speaker 00

  That one moment.

• 1:54:24Trevor Noah?

  It gives you a, a different memory, it gives you a different, and you were forced to share it with people who are singing at each other. The same thing with Oasis and Wonderwall is it's, it's, it's this thing, even Star Wars, funny enough, where you have this, I can see in your eyes, you're like, oh, man, when I get to show my kids Star Wars.

• 1:54:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:41Trevor Noah?

  It, it, it's this. Yeah, because they then get to see how you perceive literature, fiction, storytelling, movies, whatever it may be. And they get to understand you a little bit. I always hop on about this, man.

• 1:54:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:55Trevor Noah?

  It, look at, look at societies that are generally homogenous. One of the things they're really good at doing, by the way, do you say homogenous or homogeneous? I always want to ask like an English person this.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  I say, uh, homo, I would say homogeneous, but I often pronounce stuff incorrectly. Cause I'm an autodidact, so most of what I learnt, I've learnt reading it and I'm quite dyslexic.

• 1:55:14Trevor Noah?

  We all think that's the right one.

• 1:55:15Speaker 00

  You would just think.

• 1:55:16Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna go with you then, so homogeneous, I'm gonna go with you, just it's safer. So if you look at homogeneous societies, they're very good at agreeing on something.

• 1:55:24Speaker 00

  Now like you're talking about a really smart gay guy.

• 1:55:26Trevor Noah?

  You see now, you see now, it does sound like that. That's why I've always said homogeneous.

• 1:55:30Speaker 00

  He's a homo genius. Guys are homo, Leonardo da Vinci was a homo genius.

• 1:55:36Trevor Noah?

  What a homo genius. So when you look at these cultures.

• 1:55:41Speaker 00

  You know, you know, he invented the reach around. He's actually a homo genius.

• 1:55:50Trevor Noah?

  When you look at these cultures, one of the things they're really good at doing is coming to consensus quickly and moving forward in a direction.

• 1:55:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Right? What are they generally bad at doing? Innovating or rather choosing an outfit that may be better for them, even though the outfit they've kept for so long worked and was their favorite.

• 1:56:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that, that, that idea, you know, it's Thomas Sowell, isn't it? There's no solutions, only trade-offs.

• 1:56:15Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes, yes, completely.

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  You can go to places that are very, very high trust.

• 1:56:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20Speaker 00

  You know, if it's Japan or Denmark, where everyone's the same.

• 1:56:23Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:56:23Speaker 00

  And it's super high trust, great. But I, I like that kind of, the multiculturalism, the idea that you go to places like London where people are from two hundred different nations.

• 1:56:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:56:34Speaker 00

  And they, and they come together, but that, you know, it's not as high trust, but okay, I'll, I'll take that. I, I, you know, I love that idea that people kind of can, and, and proper, you know, properly enjoying travel and other cultures.

• 1:56:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Speaker 00

  Is very valuable, but a, a lot of people are just like tourists. They say they love other cultures and what they mean is music, food, festivals. But they never want to engage in the real stuff.

• 1:56:58Trevor Noah?

  No, they don't.

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  And I think the privilege of our job is we get to travel the world and talk to people and engage with the difficult stuff. They think about that thing differently.

• 1:57:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:08Trevor Noah?

  That's actually fascinating. He literally, when he came back from Cape Verde, he, it was more about, you, you, you always, it was the, you said the people, but the ideas is what you were more.

• 1:57:18Speaker 00

  The people and the ideas that they share, their philosophy towards life, them realizing where they are. They, they know that they're in the middle of the ocean. They are floating in tiny, seven tiny rocks in the middle of the ocean. They know that for a fact and they're like, we've only got each other. So them as a society and as a community, like, no, no, we've got a philosophy, it's served us well, it makes us survive this thing. Therefore, we've got each other to take care of. I think that there's often that and like the cultural memory of a place. My, my girl is Canadian and I think there's something about the Canadian winters that makes Canadian people much nicer. Cause if someone knocks on your door and says, can I come inside? Yeah, cause if you don't, you're gonna freeze to death.

• 1:57:57Trevor Noah?

  The cultural memory.

• 1:57:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:57:59Trevor Noah?

  It's why Africans have more time for people.

• 1:58:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:58:03Trevor Noah?

  We're not as precious about time, we just generally aren't. And it's the biggest friction like you'll see with like.

• 1:58:09Speaker 00

  Europeans and Africans.

• 1:58:11Trevor Noah?

  And Africans when they're in Africa, they're like.

• 1:58:12Speaker 00

  They've been called African time.

• 1:58:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they'd be like, they'd be like, yeah, but nothing, you know, you, have you, have you been to Africa? Yeah, nothing runs on time, yeah, everything is, then I'm like, yes, because it didn't need to. You must remember this time that you have created is a construct that you very desperately needed to facilitate your survival. Cause if the snow was coming, you had to make sure that the things were, you know, reaped at the right time. Your fruits were taken away, your stuff was stored. If the carriage didn't pick you up before the storm, you were dead if you're.

• 1:58:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Trevor Noah?

  But in Africa, those things didn't exist as a concept, so time is just a thing we're experiencing. But if you look at the cultural memory of time, Africans never thought of it as a scarce thing because it didn't affect their existence. So Africans didn't go, so there's a fascinating book I remember reading about it, because our whole lives, we know it. And then I read a book that talked about it. It's why Africans open their mouth more when they speak, why they speak slower. So it doesn't matter where you're from on the African continent, there'll be that thing, you know, like.

• 1:59:11Trevor Noah?

  It's big and it's open, why? The air is warmer generally.

• 1:59:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:59:16Trevor Noah?

  You, you don't worry about losing your body heat and there's no rush. And then when you go to the coldest places, you look at like the Scandinavia, the Sweden, tuk, tuk, hira, small words.

• 1:59:26Speaker 00

  Thin lips. I always thought that thing about, like, interesting about spicy food.

• 1:59:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  So the, the further south you go, the spicier the food is.

• 1:59:34Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:59:34Speaker 00

  It doesn't matter whether you, you could be in South America, you could be in Africa, spicy. And it's about the pathogen load. The spices kill the pathogens.

• 1:59:42Trevor Noah?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:59:43Speaker 00

  There's no pathogens in the north. So if you go to Scandinavia and you kill a chicken and you cook it, you can be okay. If you go to, if you go to Africa, you better put some, you better put some spices in there.

• 1:59:56Trevor Noah?

  To kill whatever's in there.

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

  Kill the pathogens. It's like morning sickness. You know about morning sickness?

• 2:00:01Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 2:00:01Speaker 00

  So morning sickness affects women from this week to this week.

• 2:00:04Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 2:00:04Speaker 00

  Why? Cause that's when the organs are being born, are being made.

• 2:00:08Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 2:00:09Speaker 00

  So if you're making the organs and you get sick, that's a real problem. So your sensitivity to pathogens during those weeks goes through the fucking roof. Morning sickness then goes away when the baby's just getting bigger, when you're just growing it. But the organs are there. So what is a congenital heart problem? It's when someone got sick on that day. Something went wrong on that day. There's no do-overs in nature. You have to be healthy on that day. Interesting, right?

• 2:00:33Trevor Noah?

  All of this is interesting to me. And that's why I.

• 2:00:36Speaker 00

  What did you think there? You said friction. I think friction is one of the, like my kind of theory at the moment.

• 2:00:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:44Speaker 00

  Friction is good. Friction is very good. Right? Low friction, TikTok, very low friction, right? Super entertaining, low friction, easy, right?

• 2:00:51Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 2:00:51Speaker 00

  Um, TV shows.

• 2:00:53Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  A little bit more friction. You go sit down, watch this thing.

• 2:00:55Trevor Noah?

  You have to wait for it. Yeah.

• 2:00:57Speaker 00

  Okay, put it on. Okay, great. Okay, we'll watch it, pay attention. Movie, two hours, three hours, maybe. More friction. Okay, but better. When you can remember, book, oh, Jesus, the friction, difficult, but you never forget what you read.

• 2:01:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Speaker 00

  Like more friction is better.

• 2:01:14Trevor Noah?

  And who wrote it? Yeah. Who said whatever? Yes. LL Cool J said on the show, which I, which I really loved, remember when he was talking about like life? Mm hmm. And then, and he was talking essentially about the idea of

• 2:01:28Trevor Noah?

  assuming that things will come with friction makes, what, what did he say? He said friction makes easy things difficult and difficult things impossible. Do you know what I mean? Just the friction. It makes an easy thing seem difficult and a difficult thing seem impossible because of the friction that is attached to it. And when you think of it through that lens, you, it's funny you say that because I've literally been on this for a long, you and I talk about this all the time. In our friend group now, we try and engage with friction purposefully.

• 2:01:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:56Trevor Noah?

  Like, like, like purposefully, we drive each other to the airport now.

• 2:01:59Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:00Trevor Noah?

  Like we'll ask each other, can you drop me off at the airport?

• 2:02:02Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 2:02:03Trevor Noah?

  And we know why we're doing it. It's not gonna be fun.

• 2:02:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:02:07Trevor Noah?

  But that drive to the airport.

• 2:02:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:09Trevor Noah?

  Will bring you some of the greatest memories of friendship that you will ever have.

• 2:02:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:14Trevor Noah?

  Because it wasn't a lunch, there wasn't someone interrupting you, are you guys gonna order something else? Are you gonna? And, and I, that's what I worry about in society is a lot of how we come together as people is governed by our financial means now.

• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:27Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean? It's, it's becoming more and more that, do you wanna go on a date? Can you do it without money? No. So then how do you date?

• 2:02:35Trevor Noah?

  Let's go out for a drink. Let's go out for a, so many of these things have become, you know, when I was a kid, I think of like the luckiness of it. Yes, the parks and everything, but there's the mall. You know, kids, parents would just drop their kids at the mall, no money.

• 2:02:47Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 2:02:47Trevor Noah?

  And all of us would just run around in a mall for ten hours and it was just like our, our place of like being.

• 2:02:54Speaker 00

  With each other.

• 2:02:55Trevor Noah?

  Yes, with each other. They were kids who had money, kids who didn't have money.

• 2:02:58Speaker 00

  I think about this in, in a slightly different way, but like, actually, I talk about this in the show at the moment about how

• 2:03:04Speaker 00

  uh, men need therapy because women have got each other. Women are very good at talking to each other. Men have, we've got friends, but we don't talk to our friends. We do things with our friends.

• 2:03:18Trevor Noah?

  I feel like we're living the same life.

• 2:03:19Speaker 00

  We need an excuse to do something. So we go, we're gonna go and see the football.

• 2:03:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:23Speaker 00

  We have to go and see the football or we're gonna play pool or we're gonna go for a drink or we have to have an activity based. We can't just say, I wanna have a conversation. And it's actually, there's something about testosterone that makes it very difficult to look people in the eyes and have a long conversation. It's much better if you have a friend that's having a crisis to play a game of pool or go on a drive. Be doing something, be, have a distraction, have something else that's going on while you're talking to them, seems to work.

• 2:03:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:52Trevor Noah?

  This is why I always love hanging with you. I genuinely feel like we are like connected by some invisible force. I'll play the audio from the show, literally.

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Trevor Noah?

  This is what I'm talking about right now to the audiences is

• 2:04:06Trevor Noah?

  as men, we're living in a world where the things that we take for granted that used to connect us are now becoming harder and harder for us to just attain, you know what I mean?

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18Trevor Noah?

  So whether it is the local pub and being able to afford just being there, whether it's because you, you can afford your electricity, you can afford, afford, like all of these things.

• 2:04:29Speaker 00

  Bit on, I, I'm very pro, I did a bit recently where I said, I'm very pro uh, drinking. I'm pro gangs and I'm pro um, gambling.

• 2:04:41Trevor Noah?

  No, I haven't seen this. Pro drinking, pro gangs, pro gangs, pro gambling.

• 2:04:46Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm, okay, so I'm pro gangs because some gangs deal drugs and shoot people. They're not good, but most gangs, it's groups of men that come together and where should men be? Together. Like, if you go to anyone that's having relationship difficulties, I'll tell you what their problem is. All relationships have the same problem. It's one person, say, every argument there's ever been between a man and a woman is someone going, you're not enough people.

• 2:05:11Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:05:12Speaker 00

  You're not enough people. We want one person, yeah, Esther Perel's the genius on this.

• 2:05:16Trevor Noah?

  No, she literally talks about this all the time.

• 2:05:18Speaker 00

  You go, you need more than that. You need your friends, you need your buddies. And men are very good at checking other men, right? I'm pro, I've set up a group of um, uh, youth clubs uh, across Britain. They've got like, they've got pool tables, they've got um, dartboards, they've got music, they've got drinks, they're called pubs. And they're the greatest youth clubs there have ever been, right? They're everywhere. We should lower the voting age, the, the drinking age to sixteen. Because if you don't think sixteen year olds are drinking, you're living in a fucking dream world, right? Good luck in your fairy tale land. But I'd rather they were drinking in pubs with other people than on their own in the park.

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  So I'd say the drinking age should be just wine and beer, no hard stuff.

• 2:06:06Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:06:06Speaker 00

  You can drink in a pub when you're sixteen, but you have to bring three friends. Can't go on your own. You gotta have, four people have to be there in order to drink, right? So I'm pro gang, little gang of you.

• 2:06:18Trevor Noah?

  Little gang, yeah.

• 2:06:19Speaker 00

  You're allowed to go to the pub, you're allowed to watch football in the pub, the pub probably has a football team that you can join.

• 2:06:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Speaker 00

  Like, other men will check you. If you start to be a dick, you'll get thrown out.

• 2:06:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:29Speaker 00

  They'll let you know real quick, right? The bartender will cut you off if you get drunk. You'll get each other home. You, you'll be all right. That's like, it's, but it's the real world as well, as opposed to the practical, as opposed to going, I guess young people shouldn't drink, so just they'll. What are you talking about? The drinking age, it's crazy. And then pro gambling is like, the, the gamble though shouldn't be sports betting or casinos. It should be the big gamble. What are you gonna do with your life?

• 2:06:54Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  You could do anything you want with your life, you just have to face the consequences. And I think men have, you know, people often talk about how ninety percent of the CEOs in the world are men. But you have to also consider ninety percent of the people in prisons are men. And it's the same drug at the center of that, it's testosterone.

• 2:07:12Trevor Noah?

  Same personalities as well sometimes, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 00

  Men take insane risks, right? That's what we do. Sometimes crash and fail, sometimes we do very well. But that thing of like, channeling that into making good bets.

• 2:07:23Trevor Noah?

  LL Cool J said it yesterday, right?

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Trevor Noah?

  Said if he wasn't a great prolific musician and an actor.

• 2:07:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:28Trevor Noah?

  New York could have been a different place.

• 2:07:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's like, he would have been in the streets doing, he's like, that same energy?

• 2:07:33Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07:34Speaker 00

  He would have taken it somewhere else and he's like, good luck, New York. You would have known my name in a very different way. Because it is that same, it's that same energy that's going somewhere. But that, that friction thing you're talking about has become my newest passion because I've realized even in my own life how convenience is a thief that steals things you didn't even know you had.

• 2:07:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:58Speaker 00

  It's really, really powerful how it does it.

• 2:08:00Trevor Noah?

  I mean, the AI thing with me, don't outsource any skill you are not comfortable losing.

• 2:08:10Trevor Noah?

  Because you're gonna lose it.

• 2:08:11Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 2:08:12Trevor Noah?

  You're not gonna be able to do it. You're gonna have to work on it. If you play your instrument, you play your instrument, right? You get good, but you have to keep on playing it. You have to practice, you have to put the practice in. And if you, if you outsource that, you're, it's gone.

• 2:08:24Speaker 00

  But that's what I mean. It's the convenience. It's the, it's just the convenience of the, you know, the food arriving, the convenience of the car that picks you up, the convenience, the convenience, the convenience, the convenience. And then you go, like, when I think, the biggest thing I, I like, I get sad about, and it's like, it's, it's a conundrum, I know, it's, you know? Like in South Africa, I think of like townships when we were growing up.

• 2:08:43Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:44Speaker 00

  It is the most inconvenient experience.

• 2:08:48Speaker 00

  Your neighbors play music at six AM on the weekend, loud, you're all, everyone hears everyone's music. Everyone knows everybody's business. Everybody's talking to you. You can't walk anywhere without having a conversation with somebody. So you can't like just pop to the shops and come back real quick. There's no such thing.

• 2:09:05Trevor Noah?

  No privacy.

• 2:09:06Speaker 00

  Everyone's asking you if they can borrow money from you. Everyone, if you've got a car, then you've now become the de facto transportation person for everyone. Hey Eugene, we heard you got a car. Oh, we heard you, can you help us move this? Oh, can you do this? And if you have some.

• 2:09:19Trevor Noah?

  Hospital drop off graduation.

• 2:09:21Speaker 00

  Then you all have to go and cook for them. It's all, the whole thing is just friction, Jimmy. It's just friction, friction, friction, friction. But can I tell you what it is? I never once heard a story once in the township, ever, in Sohwa, never. I never heard a story of like, do you know someone died and no one knew for like two months? I, those stories that I read in the newspaper now in life.

• 2:09:40Trevor Noah?

  Don't exist.

• 2:09:40Speaker 00

  They literally never existed, never, never, never, never existed. There was literally no homeless person. Think about it.

• 2:09:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:49Speaker 00

  There was literally, this is a place where people had been pushed into the worst types of poverty imaginable. And yet there was not a single person homeless, sleeping on the streets. Which doesn't make sense because you're like, but no one had money.

• 2:10:01Trevor Noah?

  Or saying that family is poor, right?

• 2:10:03Speaker 00

  That wasn't the thing. They just, they just had less.

• 2:10:06Trevor Noah?

  Yo, man.

• 2:10:06Speaker 00

  But poverty, it's not a real thing in a township. Someone will interfere.

• 2:10:09Trevor Noah?

  Because the friction, the friction that came with it meant, man, a friendship is friction?

• 2:10:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:10:14Trevor Noah?

  Because now it's like, okay, well, what do you wanna watch, Jimmy?

• 2:10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, what do you want?

• 2:10:17Trevor Noah?

  I know what I wanna watch.

• 2:10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:10:18Trevor Noah?

  What do you wanna watch? Ah, damn it, Jimmy wants to watch his own thing. So now I have to like, we have to negotiate, we have to find a common. But you know what that friction gives us in return? It gives us the friendship. A relationship is friction, hell of friction, terrible friction. This person wants to, you wanna do that. Kids are friction. You, you, you gave me, can I tell you? You gave me the most, you sent me the most beautiful message about that. Literally changed my whole perspective. You said, man, you like kids, it is the most insane journey. You said, I cannot wait to get out of the house and leave. And he's like, and as soon as I walk out the door, man, I'm even more excited to come back. You're like, ah, I cannot wait to get back. It's the friction of it.

• 2:10:57Speaker 00

  Hmm, yeah.

• 2:10:58Trevor Noah?

  But we've been sold, everyone has been sold, and I mean everyone. We've been sold on the convenience of relationships, the convenience of opinion, the conveni- now it's like, oh, yeah, if you're gonna go to your family, don't talk about the, just ignore that. Rather than talk about, it's like, yeah, but that friction.

• 2:11:12Speaker 00

  You know, you know.

• 2:11:13Trevor Noah?

  Leaves you, where does it leave you?

• 2:11:14Speaker 00

  I was chatting to a guy recently, Alex Hormozi, do you know Alex?

• 2:11:16Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 2:11:17Speaker 00

  He's a really smart guy, really smart guy.

• 2:11:18Trevor Noah?

  I don't know.

• 2:11:19Speaker 00

  So Alex Hormozi is, uh, he like runs gyms and things. He's, uh, he, he lives in, I saw him in Vegas recently. He's kind of a public intellectual, but he's also, he's, he's a great fun guy to talk to. So we're chatting about friction, and then he started chatting about optionality. Like, we've oversolved for options, right? You've got a lot of options right now, right? But actually, constraints are freeing. Cause your problem is you've got too many options. Young people, they've got too many options. You could be with anyone, you could do anything. It's, it's a lot. But once you've decided who to be with and what to do, you can stop thinking about how to live and get on with living.

• 2:11:57Trevor Noah?

  Get on with it.

• 2:11:58Speaker 00

  Hmm. Like, limiting, limiting what you, what you have options wise. Cause if you never cash in the option, it's nothing.

• 2:12:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:08Speaker 00

  Options are there to be cashed in.

• 2:12:09Trevor Noah?

  Hmm. Oh, I like that. Options are there to be ca- I've never, options are there to be cashed in. Yeah, the freedom that comes with that. So now that's, that's, that's the thing I'm preaching.

• 2:12:20Speaker 00

  Freedom's overrated.

• 2:12:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:21Speaker 00

  I'm evangelical about.

• 2:12:23Trevor Noah?

  Have you seen that video, um, it went viral in South Africa? It was of the prisoners and they made a, they had some guy on the phone and was making a video. And one of the prisoners, they were like interviewing each other, it was really funny, and then got people very angry in the country. But they were like, yo, what's it like being in jail? And he's like, he's like, ah, he's like, jail, he's like, I love this place. I know what time I have to go to bed. I know when I'm gonna get my food. I've got my friends every day. We know what we're gonna do. I don't worry about what's gonna happen tomorrow. I don't. And, and people got very angry because they're like, we need to make prisons more shit.

• 2:12:58Speaker 00

  In South Africa?

• 2:12:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:59Speaker 00

  What is it? What is it, the twenty eights, isn't it?

• 2:13:01Trevor Noah?

  Oh, no, no, this was, no, this wasn't like in the.

• 2:13:03Speaker 00

  Well, no, it was the gang.

• 2:13:04Trevor Noah?

  That's the gang. No, this wasn't a gang. This was just prisoners in a, I'm, I'm sure you remember the video, but it went viral. And people were like, is this, they went like, people are suffering in the streets, but in prison, people are having a good time.

• 2:13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:13:15Trevor Noah?

  And I get what they were saying. But I think what some people might have missed in that moment was just that guy and his perspective, first of all, because I don't think he speaks for all prisoners. But he was going, it's surprisingly liberating being in a world where you have so many constraints. Because all I have to do is find my freedom within these constraints.

• 2:13:32Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:13:33Trevor Noah?

  And it's exactly what you're saying.

• 2:13:34Speaker 00

  Look forward to those gaps, yeah.

• 2:13:35Trevor Noah?

  You've chosen it, and it's like, because you've chosen, it's like, okay, you're stuck, yeah, but because you've, you've anchored yourself to this, you're, you're free now to like, you know?

• 2:13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's also, it's, it's kind of stoic. It's the idea that you go, the guy didn't choose to be in prison, I don't know what he did, but he's there now and he's making the best of it.

• 2:13:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:54Speaker 00

  That's the, whatever the life is, you can only do, do what you can with what you have where you are. That's it.

• 2:14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, in, in, in war movies, you always see them talking about going home and getting that leave. But in sci-fi, sci-fi movies and the spaceship and Starship Enterprise, you never hear them on deck talking about leave. They're here.

• 2:14:13Trevor Noah?

  I've actually never thought of that.

• 2:14:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're here, but soldiers were like, yeah, we're going for downtime and R and R and we're going away. And then they go and come back again to battle. But in the Starship Enterprise, no one has ever said, have you kept in your leave to Galactica Cabanas? No one has ever said that. They, they know where they are. They're having fun where they are. They've made peace with the fact that they're in this never ending journey, this voyage.

• 2:14:35Speaker 00

  He knows Star Wars is in a documentary, right?

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  I believe it is.

• 2:14:40Trevor Noah?

  What?

• 2:14:41Speaker 00

  What's a, what's a? Sound footage.

• 2:14:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. What's a conspiracy theory you do believe?

• 2:14:46Speaker 00

  A conspiracy theory?

• 2:14:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:47Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, uh.

• 2:14:51Speaker 00

  All right, here's.

• 2:14:53Trevor Noah?

  Even if it's one of your own.

• 2:14:54Speaker 00

  All right, two, two terrifying scenarios.

• 2:14:56Trevor Noah?

  Cool.

• 2:14:57Speaker 00

  Okay, so the first is, there's a Manhattan project currently underway in America. And they're building a, uh, a doomsday machine. And it's called Solstice and it's, um, uh, artificial general intelligence, okay?

• 2:15:20Speaker 00

  Trillions of dollars are being spent on building this. Somewhere in America, we don't know where, but it's siloed off and they're building this. Second terrifying scenario, they're not.

• 2:15:40Trevor Noah?

  I think I take the second one.

• 2:15:44Speaker 00

  Okay, so the Chinese are doing it.

• 2:15:46Trevor Noah?

  Ah, this guy trapped me.

• 2:15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think someone's working on AGI at the moment. I think that's a, uh, I think it's a pretty safe bet. That they're working on AGI and you remember we, everyone was fascinated with aliens in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Because like the dummies that we are, we think drones came out four years ago in Ukraine. They've been working on that shit.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  Were you here listening to me yesterday?

• 2:16:12Speaker 00

  No, but obviously they've been around a long time, right? So.

• 2:16:14Speaker 02

  I was saying the exact same thing, Jimmy.

• 2:16:17Speaker 00

  Of course, of course. Uh, but that idea, you go, that, that, what's going on now? What are they working on right now? Um, and people worry about the wrong thing with AI. They worry about their job being taken. Obviously, we can see all the jobs AI will take. We can't see any of the jobs it will create.

• 2:16:35Trevor Noah?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:16:36Speaker 00

  And they're thinking about the wrong thing, because if you, the, the barriers to entry for running an authoritarian regime have come down by ten orders of magnitude.

• 2:16:47Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 2:16:48Speaker 00

  In the last two years.

• 2:16:50Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 2:16:51Speaker 00

  Right? So you could run the Starzi off my laptop now.

• 2:16:54Trevor Noah?

  Yep.

• 2:16:54Speaker 00

  That is a worry, because politicians will have to resist that temptation, and that's a big temptation. The other thing is physics, right? Now Peter Thiel said this, I think, if you minus the screens from the room, we're living in the early seventies. Nothing has changed in fifty years, right? So physics has two, has, you know, um, general theory of relativity and Newtonian physics, and they don't quite match. There's no general theory that unites everything. Well, with this new technology, could there be? Because wealth is energy transferred. And if we, if, if physics gets to another level using this technology, everything changes, everything.

• 2:17:44Trevor Noah?

  Is this the part of the show where you start asking the audience for questions?

• 2:17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:50Trevor Noah?

  We're just sitting there in the audience.

• 2:17:53Trevor Noah?

  Uh, well, Jimmy.

• 2:17:58Trevor Noah?

  How you feeling, New York?

• 2:18:02Trevor Noah?

  Uh, it's terrifying, and then sometimes I'm like, ah, it's electricity, just turn it off. That's like the part of my brain that sometimes, it, it's not very logical, but I'm just like, ah, we'll, we'll turn it off, we'll unplug everything. That's what, that's what, that's one of the outcomes that I think is very possible.

• 2:18:18Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's weird. We thought, for the longest time, everyone thought that was involved or interested in AI, thought, oh, the big thing will be the Turing test. The big thing will be, can it pass as a human? And we flew past that in an afternoon.

• 2:18:30Trevor Noah?

  And then we just shifted the goalpost, yeah.

• 2:18:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Trevor Noah?

  Like, well, that, the Turing was really just a benchmark. It wasn't the, it's like, oh, you said it was the, and it's like, no, well, really, it's not the. And, and so it'll just get to a place where it's, I, I just think it's funny that a lot of the people who are selling it as the panacea, like they'll be like, oh, you know, there's, it will create infinite wealth and money won't mean anything and all of this. Yeah, but then I'm like, okay, if that's the case, give us your money then.

• 2:18:56Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, wait, no one will be poor anymore. Does that mean I won't be rich anymore?

• 2:19:02Speaker 00

  You guys haven't thought this through. This is terrible. This is terrible news. So what, what have we got? We got, we got. What we have here is paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  What a great combo.

• 2:19:20Speaker 00

  Roll the dice.

• 2:19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's see what happens.

• 2:19:25Trevor Noah?

  This has been fun, man.

• 2:19:26Speaker 00

  It's great to see you.

• 2:19:27Trevor Noah?

  By the way, um, so, uh, when are you gonna be touring the US again?

• 2:19:31Speaker 00

  I think next year. Next year I'll, I'll, I'll come back, have a doubt at that.

• 2:19:35Trevor Noah?

  Cause every time I, I hear you in Australia, you're massive in Australia, man.

• 2:19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, Australia and New Zealand are very good to me. I mean, I, I do fifty countries on the tour now. It's, uh.

• 2:19:43Trevor Noah?

  Fifty?

• 2:19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, fifty.

• 2:19:44Trevor Noah?

  How do you break that down? How much time are you on the road in a year?

• 2:19:47Speaker 00

  Uh, I do maybe, um, two hundred shows, uh, uh, two hundred nights a year, something like that. But the UK's my biggest market probably, and I, like, if I'm there, I can be in my own bed every night.

• 2:20:00Trevor Noah?

  That is nice.

• 2:20:00Speaker 00

  So I feel like I, I get to spend, like, work-life balance, it's like, huh, you work and have a family, that's it. Forget the percentages, it'll change over the years.

• 2:20:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09Speaker 00

  Um, but yeah, I, I spend a lot of time kind of traveling around the world. It's great.

• 2:20:13Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so you'll be, and then come back to the US? Do you have like a favorite US city you're performing?

• 2:20:18Speaker 00

  Favorite US city? I don't, I mean, it's all good, it's all kind of very.

• 2:20:22Trevor Noah?

  No, no, but I'm just saying, is there like a spot where you go, I find every comedian has a, uh, a place, it might even be a venue, where it feels like lightning just keeps hitting you when you stand on that stage.

• 2:20:34Speaker 00

  I thi- I mean, the, the Chicago Theater is pretty special, uh, the Boston Wang, pretty amazing, the Beacon here. Like, there, there's an era in which America built theaters that are just better, because they, they won't ever do it again, because the fire restrictions and the health and safety won't let them do it again. Like, the, the seats are too close together and the aisles are too small. Yeah, that's the reason, they can't, you, if you build a thousand seater theater now, it's the same size a two thousand seater used to be. Because the seats are a little bit bigger and the aisles are a little bit bigger, and they now have a thing called fire safety. Fire safety be, used to be a guy going.

• 2:21:07Trevor Noah?

  With a whistle.

• 2:21:08Speaker 00

  I, I guess, I guess, don't have a fire? It's probably the best idea. That's the best we got is don't have a fire.

• 2:21:14Trevor Noah?

  While people were smoking.

• 2:21:15Speaker 00

  So you wonder why the theaters from that era are very special, because they're, they're grandfathered in, they're just better.

• 2:21:23Trevor Noah?

  Ah, okay. You learn something here every day. Mm hmm. I like this. By the way, grandfather, it is a racist term, you know that. How so? Remember Sam Merrill talking about this?

• 2:21:32Speaker 00

  Grandfathered in is a racist term?

• 2:21:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Do you remember we were talking about Sam Merrill? Mm hmm. Do you remember this? We were talking to him, yes. We're talking with, so Sam Merrill was on the podcast. And then someone said grand, he said grandfathered in, I think. And then we, I said as a joke to him, I was like, you know, that's, that's, we're talking about the history of terms and whatever. You know, nursery rhymes, blah, blah, and we're like racist, racist. Then he said, yeah, grandfathered in. Then I said, oh, that's also racist. Then he said, is it? I was like, no, I'm joking. I just, then he's like, well, it probably is. And then I went and I read up on it and it actually is a term that comes from America's sordid past.

• 2:22:03Speaker 00

  Sordid past? Wait, what did they do?

• 2:22:06Trevor Noah?

  We'll save that for the next conversation, Jimmy.

• 2:22:08Speaker 00

  What a way to find out. What, what? Yeah, we're gonna end on a cliffhanger. Apparently, America has a sordid past. We'll find out.

• 2:22:16Trevor Noah?

  The Bible and America, I don't want to spoil it for you. I don't want to tell you the endings.

• 2:22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:21Trevor Noah?

  Go out there and enjoy it.

• 2:22:24Speaker 00

  I can't believe. Sordid past, is it? Is this the Kim Kardashian sex tape? I can't think what you could be talking about.

• 2:22:32Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man, this is fun. By the way, is the book out?

• 2:22:34Speaker 00

  The book's out in October. It's really, it's, um, it's for

• 2:22:38Trevor Noah?

  I'm so excited for this.

• 2:22:39Speaker 00

  Comedians. I got your copy.

• 2:22:41Trevor Noah?

  The, uh, the, the last, the last book I read that was like, I felt like a textbook for comedians was Stuart Lee.

• 2:22:50Speaker 00

  All right.

• 2:22:50Trevor Noah?

  Was one of my favorite books I've ever read. Remember, it was one of my favorite, you know why? Because for 20 years of my life, I have, and obviously this was before, but then still for 20 years of my life, I have worked in a profession where there is almost like no instruction, there is no Guidebook. Guidebook, there is no, but there isn't like, it almost feels like there isn't even a, even for posterity. Yes. Like music, people can go, here's the, the notation and this is how it was. And then, and then we are in this industry that, as you said, keeps growing, changing the world, doing things, we're in it, we're, we're and there's no like.

• 2:23:23Speaker 00

  There's no, there's nowhere to point someone that wants to start in this or get better at this. And this wasn't just me, this is my friend Amanda Baker and Abby Grant as well. Uh, like, we put this thing together and we think we have something, but the proof is in the pudding. Like, if, if you can become a comedian post reading this, then it works.

• 2:23:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:41Speaker 00

  And that, and for people that want to do public speaking, and I think comedy is, for me, it's that thing of like, you want more people to get involved in this.

• 2:23:48Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 2:23:48Speaker 00

  It's, it's not.

• 2:23:49Trevor Noah?

  The more the merrier. Yeah.

• 2:23:51Speaker 00

  The, the more the merrier, quite literally. Finding joy in these things.

• 2:23:54Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:55Speaker 00

  Great.

• 2:23:56Trevor Noah?

  This is fun. Thanks, Jimmy.

• 2:23:57Speaker 00

  Thanks, man. What a pleasure.

• 2:24:00Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Parduff. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

• 2:24:30Speaker 04

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